It really comes down to two things: privacy and personhood.
If I were to speculate, I imagine that in the not-so-distant future, our children will not know a day in their lives when their presence and personhood wasn't widely, or even publicly available via the internet. So many of my friends and family post hundreds of photos, videos and updates about their children on social media for the world to see. To me, it's understandable that proud parents would want to show off their children, but I (without judging those who do), simply cannot get on board.
My wife and I discussed this at length over several months. We both have a pretty large (but diminishing) online presence. We often joke that I'm an Instagram Husband, and we both love taking photos. However, when it comes to our daughter, we have decided to do all that we can to control what gets posted about her online, especially images of her and detailed personal stories and information.
Why?
First of all: privacy. Growing up, if our parents wanted to embarrass us by busting out the baby pictures and stories of our childhood blunders, at least our friends and family had to be in the same location. Nowadays, every burp-turned-volcano of vomit, explosive bowel movement, angsty sob, and temper tantrum is posted for too many people to see. But beyond this - what I contend is probably of very little consequence - privacy becomes so much more important to our daughter in the future.
Facial recognition has gotten so robust that it can accurately identify faces in a crowded arena, automatically tag photos for you, or even be used to look you up online. It really interesting to me that many fail to see the potential for harm here. I am by no means an alarmist, but I do recall many of our parents intentionally avoiding monogramming or displaying names on our backpacks in grade school, yet parents and grandparents (yes, the same grandparents who, as parents, protected our backpacks) have no issue with posting incredible amounts of information about their children or grandchildren online. It really is a trivial task for anyone who wants to find out more information about your child to access way too much information about them, whatever the motivation may be.
Aside from the obviously nefarious, there are other reasons why people might want to find children online.
The first reason is corporate. The parents who post incessantly about their children have effectively chronicled the child's life for anyone to whom their posts are visible. Ahhh. But you say you post to "Friends Only." Now I know this won't apply to everyone, but what about those friend requests you get and just aren't sure about? It looks like you have a lot of mutual friends, this person may have gone to your high school, and maybe the got married or changed names. You're not sure, but maybe you've met them and, judging by your mutual friends and similar backgrounds, you probably just don't remember their name. So what do you do? Many people will accept friend requests like that rather than the alternative possibility of feeling bad for ignoring someone you actually knew (and obviously cared for a great deal...).
Bam! There it is. A contracting tech company created that profile, friended you, and now has all the information you provide to "Friends Only," if you were even limiting your posts to being with. If you're posting to "Friends of Friends" and think one of your friends might fall for something similar, you're essentially handing over personal information about you and your family.
But what would a company do with the information? If I were them, I'd be running some pretty robust statistical analysis and selling the data to advertisers, insurance agencies, and the like.
Imagine your child, now 26, gets a letter in the mail notifying them of a change in their health insurance premiums. Perhaps the letter reads something like this: "We are increasing your rates by 20% based on demographic and other data we obtained regarding your risk for disease X. People who displayed both head sizes and eye distance of Y cm (we'll be using the metric system by then) at ages 2, 3 and 4 have been strongly correlated with disease X. Therefore, in order to continue to provide you with premium care, your rates have been adjusted to reflect your relative risk."
Maybe the letter doesn't say that specifically (it likely wouldn't), but maybe it just references some data was collected and used in the determination, or maybe it mentions nothing of the reasons and is only a notification of an increase of premiums.
Aside from insurance companies, a college or employer may be interested in some statistical analysis associated with your child. Perhaps a college might determine that, according to their residential history, parents' vehicles, etc., your child does not qualify for work-study, financial aid, or even admission. Similarly, and employer may say, "we've observed a strong correlation between people who listen to The Decemberists (and similar music) and people who call in sick more than the average employee. Let's interview a few more candidates."
It sounds far-fetched, but Big Data is the way of the future. Just like it revolutionized baseball, it's revolutionizing the way we conduct business and advertise to consumers.
In the interest of keeping this short, I'll move on from the privacy issue, though it could span for many, many posts.
Next up: personhood.
Continuing on the Big Data topic, have you noticed any ads on your social media accounts in which you're totally not interested but Facebook, Instagram, etc. has insisted was curated for and targeted specifically to you? I get a lot of those. Because I was in the military, Facebook really thinks I should buy a ridiculously arrogant and misguided T-shirt, of which they've tried to advertise many. As it turns out, many military members and veterans do buy these shirts, and Facebook wants their advertisers to make more money so that they, themselves, make more money.
So I get a targeted ad because Facebook thinks it knows me. I absolutely despise the shirts that are pushed in my face, but based on some data collected about me, someone (a computer probably) has made the decision that I'm arrogant (or at least enough to buy a shirt like that). While I may be arrogant, it's certainly not about my military service. Still, apparently this is how I'm known. That's one of many conclusion of the data aggregated from my online presence. While this one isn't all that bad, some conclusions may very well be worse without my knowing. (Sorry for the Fox News source. I couldn't readily find it elsewhere, but I do remember this happening on our base with many faith-based website that were labelled as "extremist." An odd conclusion for many, but likely justified for a few).
Moving beyond Facebook mining data and coming to a conclusion about my affiliations and personality, how are the people we know doing the same with our children and their personalities - their personhood?
If I were to post about how smart my child is, maybe how short-tempered she is, or even how she's not as smart as her sibling but has such a big heart (all of these are made up scenarios), I am now projecting to the world an image of her. Friends and family who rarely see her will come to feel as if they know her through my photos and stories - the same way you feel like you know someone with whom you've had no contact for a decade based solely on their social media account. There are two key factors, though: 1. You had the opportunity to meet your Facebook friends before linking up on social media, and 2. Social media is pruned.
Many people agonize over exactly what to post and when to post it in order to create the best image of themselves for those in their circles. I was surprised to see what people thought of me based on all my social media posts of NASA and privacy issues at my high school reunion. While it was flattering, my life is way more mundane than Facebook may have led on. I can say to people I haven't talked to in 10 years "I just applied to be an astronaut," but the people with whom I have regular contact know that I'd likely never make the cut. Good thing I only have regular contact with about 5% of my Facebook friends. I'm still impressive to at least 95% of my friends!
Aside from family and friends (and predators and corporations) having built a sense of my daughter's identity through my pruned social media sharing, what happens when I impose my own view of her personality on her or project it to friends and family?
I know that imposing my view of her personality on her and projecting it to others is difficult to avoid. We like to characterize and generalize everything. It's what humans do, and it's why we've progressed so far as a species, but I don't want to unnecessarily characterize my daughter to others. When my cousin, great aunt, or whomever meets my daughter for the first time, I want her to be her. I don't want her to be trying to live up to some image of her I have perpetuated online, and I don't want my family members' attitudes and behaviors toward her to be unduly influenced by these impersonal constructs. If they hear stories of her prior to meeting her, they will hear it verbally, where tone, intent and conversation can elucidated.
I want to give my daughter the freedom to be herself; I want to give her the freedom to make her own first impression... and second, and third.
I want to protect my daughter's future opportunities.
It will be extremely difficult for the CIA, NSA, or FBI to find officers and agents that do not carry with them decades of baggage in the form of cached data from the Internet - social media in particular. Running for political office in the future will be completely changed by the amount of personal information and history that we post about ourselves and about our children online. Friends of mine have gone into both clandestine work and politics, and cleaning up their online presence wasn't an easy task even for them. Imagine what it'll be like for children who have had their entire lives chronicled on the Internet!
So someone might say, "It's very unlikely that my son/daughter will want to go and be a CIA field officer," and I'd agree with you. But what about this: What if your son or daughter wants to be a missionary? What if they marry a missionary? What if they merely have a best friend who is a missionary? Now imagine that the mission is in a place hostile toward Christianity.
I have friends on mission all over the world, some of whom live under a cover or operate in one profession by day while spreading the Gospel by night. When the Taliban, host country government, or whomever finds out that one of your friends or family members posted a status 5 years ago "praying for [your child] as they prepare for a life of missions," do you think they'll believe that your son or daughter is doing anything other than seeking to spread Christianity? I don't want to bring undue attention to anyone I love in hostile regions, and mining social media is routine. Checking passports and visas against that data is also routine.
This issue is bigger than just our children; we all need to cleanup our online lives and associations, especially if you know missionaries overseas (I'll do a separate post about this later). However, we can start with our children. We can attempt to keep as much as we can about them offline until they, themselves, can make an informed decision on what to share with the world.
Lastly, in examining the reasons NOT to post too much information about our children online, we would be remiss in not exploring the reasons we might *want* to share with the world.
The most prominent reason that comes to mind is pride. It's not wrong to be proud of your child, in and of itself, and children often appreciate it when parents are proud of them. But how do your posts benefit your child? Isn't direct praise better than praise that they might not even be able to read for many years? If you want to keep a record of how proud you are of them to show them when they're older, make a journal (digital or paper), make a scrapbook, or open an email address for them when they're young and email them photos, a description of what is happening, and your thoughts regarding the situation. Then, when they're old enough, let them know you've been doing it, give them the password so they can change it and view all the heartfelt notes and memories, and you can even keep sending things to them! (If you do this, log in every month or so to keep the account active until they take ownership of it! If all else fails, you'll have the memories in your "Sent" folder too)
When I got engaged to my wife, I posted it and got over 400 "likes" within 24 hours, while she got nearly 300 for posting the same thing. I won't lie; It felt really good to see everyone liking my status. I'm not exactly sure why. Part of it was because we got to share the joy with so many other people, but a big part of it was that I was proud. I couldn't believe someone so smart and beautiful would ever agree to marry me. I wanted to show the world. I needed everyone to know that she was mine - that I really had a catch. Of course, this wasn't the primary reason, and it wasn't even a thought going through my head at the time, but isn't pride of this nature behind nearly everything we post online - even if just a little?
I can only imagine that photos and updates about my daughter would be similarly motivated. I want to share in the joy of fatherhood with others, and I want to brag a little bit about how awesome my kid is. Still, I simply refuse to let me pride define who she is. I cannot allow my excitement for seeing triple-digit "likes" potentially have significant consequences in her life. My identity, like hers, should not be wrapped up in such nonsense. It ought to be rooted much deeper.
Even the possible consequences discussed thus far are best-guess speculations based on a not-yet-seen peak from our infatuation with social media over the past decade or so. Rather than force her to retroactively clean up her digital life in the future, I want my daughter to make a conscious, informed decision about what she shares about herself with the world. I'll save the baby photos, embarrassing stories, and updates for those with whom our family is very close, and I'll email her the photos, stories, and praise for her to look at once she's old enough for me to give her the keys to her digital life. Until then - until she can decide - my wife and I have vowed to do everything we reasonably can to give her a clean slate while still feeling loved and cherished.
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PS: I know this is going to be difficult, especially living so far away from family! I may periodically update people about how this is going, and I invite any thoughts, comments, or criticisms. I also invite any other parent who wants to do this together to contact us somehow. It's going to be difficult, but we do feel that this is one thing we can do for our children.