Our second child – the adorable, wrinkly-old-man-faced baby girl I affectionately call Baby P – was born just 3 days ago. It’s been a pretty fantastic week. When our son was born 2 years ago, I was so stressed out with trying to figure out what the hell I was doing, combined with being constantly stressed about my still-a-baby, 2-year old financial advisory practice, that I don’t remember much outside of many sleepless nights.
But there’s also been a lot more that’s happened in just the past 2 years than me becoming a better father. Twitter, for example, has grown from 26 million users to over 500 million users in just 2 years (http://ow.ly/e4uPZ; http://ow.ly/e4uH0). Facebook has had well-publicized run-ins with its members as well as privacy commissioners (http://ow.ly/e4uWv). And on some level I think we’ve all become more aware of the privacy issues involved in social media.
Or at least I thought we had. Then I decided not to post our new baby’s name on any social media. I thought people would understand pretty easily, and I didn’t think it was out of the ordinary. But man did I got a lot of tweets and FB posts complaining about the fact that I thought our baby’s name should be kept private!
I understand: it’s fascinating to find out what other people feel is a cool enough and important enough name to endow it on a new baby. For us it was a long process deciding on a name – not too ordinary, but not too different, has to be cute, but she has to be taken seriously as an adult…it’s a tough task.
But here’s the thing: through twitter, facebook, and linked in I’ve chosen to open up my personal life to a whole group of total strangers. I have over 1900 followers and over 500 LI “connections”. I don’t mention that now to brag, but to prove a point. At the very most I probably have 30 or 40 close friends. Double that for family, i have somewhere between 400 and 1800 relative strangers that can read my posts. I’ve decided that there’s enough value for me in being able to connect with those people and the information they spread. But my kids have never made that decision. And I can’t help but feel that 1800 strangers means I’ve got a lot of potential creeps following me. Most people aren’t, I’m sure. But I only need one creep to ruin our lives by finding my son or daughter’s name, realizing in the past i’ve posted what neighgborhood we live in, take a look at our pictures, and then when we’re not looking or are out of ear shot, introduce themselves to one of our kids BY NAME.
Don’t get me wrong: I know that most kids are abused by someone they know (http://ow.ly/e4v3b). But that doesn’t mean I want to be any less diligent about protecting my kids from strangers. Or being a good role model for my kids on how to deal with new technologies (or the real world). I’m not a worrier, and I don’t want to stop living our lives. But I’m a planner in my professional and personal life. And that means preparing for the bad and the good.
There’s a great passage out of “The Parking Lot Rules” by Tom Sturges that really opened my eyes to this issue. It’s called Anonymous Clothing / Anonymous Cars and here’s an excerpt:
“Put a child’s name on his clothing [like a jersey] and you have given any dangerous character an advantage: They know the child’s name! Too easily they can cross the first line of defense: familiarity.”
To all my friends, family, and friendly acquaintances: my apologies but I won’t be putting my kids’ names on twitter, facebook, linked in or any other social media. Our kids don’t get to decide how much loss of privacy they are comfortable with, and even if they could they’d probably make a dumb choice (see: sexting – http://ow.ly/e4v8H).
So please do me a favor: Don’t put my kids’ names on the web. Hell, let’s protect the privacy of everyone’s kids and commit to not putting any kids’ names on social media. Use their initials if you have to. The important people will know who you’re talking about, and the creeps will have one less tool.
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