A friend of mine had a baby recently, (in fact most of my friends seem to be having babies recently, must be a life-stage thing). Living abroad, we were keen to see the little fella, but she was reticent to upload pictures to Facebook.
Here’s a thought: as soon as a mother announces the arrival of a child, she’s publishing his date of birth and mother’s name. The answers to those most basic of security questions are already public.
This has got me thinking about the wider question of public data (I’m aware it’s a VERY wide question). To date, much of my publicly available information has either been created or curated by me. I have quite a bit of control over my public image and privacy, as I’ve grown with the network. Children born into the network are public beings. Their personality, pictures and data is liberally spread into servers by their parents before they can even string a sentence together. I foresee a generation of kids reaching their teens and spending hours deleting this parentally curated history, as they strive to define themselves in their own image.
But they won’t catch it all, will they.
