Privacy

For the last few days I’ve been thinking about the amount of personal info my husband and I put out on the internet for the whole world to see. I don’t advertise my last name (not anymore), although if you click around a bit it wouldn’t be hard to figure out. I’ve mentioned that we live in the suburbs of Birmingham, AL. I make it a point to not mention where we work/or have worked. I do censor some things… like when my husband initially put up my ultrasound pic he failed to cut out the Dr.’s name, hospital and my personal info. I made him take it down and Photoshop that out. Same with pics I’ve taken of our street. I always take out the street name and our house number. But, again, it wouldn’t be difficult to figure out where we live. There are a number of websites that will give you that info for free on just about anybody.

For the most part I’m totally OK with what we’ve shared, but I have been questioning myself a little regarding Daphne’s pics and info. A blogger I follow decided to take all the posts concerning her 7 mo old daughter to a private/invitation only blog. She has quite a few readers, and I completely understand her decision. In comparison I only have a small fraction of her traffic. Currently I have between 30-70 visits a day, and 25 feed readers. I monitor the analytics and either know who is viewing my site (Hi, Mom!! Hi, Lauren!!), or know how they came to find my site. If I had a huge amount of traffic/exposure I might decide to reveal less personal info.

But what do I really have to be concerned about? Aren’t I exposing Daphne to more risk by simply living in one of the top 10 most violent cities in America (I think we are number 7)?? I’m too lazy to figure out the stats, but I’m sure I have a better chance of something happening to Daphne while we are downtown, or in the airport area than I do from some online crazo stalker. I’m with Dooce on this one. I don’t mind posting pictures of Daphne because I expose her face to hundreds of people at the grocery store. Any one of them could decide to follow us home. I have also plugged my address info into a sex predator registry website, you know the sites that will tell you how many registered sex offenders are in your area. The convicted sex offender closest to us is actually someone we used to go to church with (and yes, I was pretty surprised!!). So going to church is probably riskier than something happening to Daphne as a result of me posting her picture on my blog or Flickr.

Which brings me to Flickr. Both my husband & I post pictures of Daphne. Unless you are listed as one of our friends or family you only see a small fraction of the pictures. I am rotten about tagging my photos, so I don’t see much traffic on my account (as compared to my husband’s 10,000+ pictures and 50,000+ views). I decided the other day to get involved in more children’s photography Flickr groups and hopefully get some feedback. I posted two pictures to a few different groups and within a few hours had a couple comments, as well as some new contacts and a few people added the pictures to their favorites. Cool! But I had a bad feeling about one of the people that added me to their contact list. If you favorite a picture of my child I will expect you to have a Flickr account with pictures of other children (your own, unless you are a professional photographer). I want it to make sense, you know? I have several kids photos from various Flickr users in my favorites- mainly because I liked the pose, or what a cute photo idea or card. This Flickr user was from another country, had a few random vacation shots of middle aged men and pages and pages of favorites of nothing but little kid photos. This is probably me being paranoid, but something didn’t add up in my mind and I had Chris block the user from my account. This incident, plus Dooce’s post and a few others got me thinking. I’m still not sure if I will change anything. But if you visit the site one day and it’s completely changed and Daphne has a pseudonym (I shall call her Moxie! I would never name my child that but I just love it, and no, I’m not a Penn Jillette fan) you’ll know I got spooked again.

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