[ivraatiems]

I have some good friends who've gone the other way: they've asked that there be as close to no photos or videos of their child on any social media as possible. They don't post about him online, and they keep pictures of him in photo albums. When he was born, they asked all of us to please refrain from taking photos of him without their permission.

I completely support this and I intend to do something similar for my kids. Anonymity is one of the best gifts I can give them.

[zomgwat]

My wife and I have done similar. We privately share photos. It took a bit for my mom to get over the fact that she can’t post pictures of her grandkids on Facebook but I was eventually able to explain why in terms she understood.

[sylens]

We are also doing this. I'm amazed at how much some people share of their kids online.

[dzhiurgis]

Same here, but I don't expect some sort of magic happening. Big tech likely know every detail of my kids anyway. It's just your social circle and bad apples within that you wanna be sure of.

[kroolik]

What arguments have you used to finally convince them?

[zomgwat]

Several things helped her accept the situation.

1. We regularly share photos through private photo albums. This allows her the same exposure to photos of the grandchildren as social media would.

2. We made it clear she's free to share photos with people via direct text messages. It adds a bit of friction and keeps the photos relatively private.

3. Explained that it's the right of our children to control their presence online (with some parental assistance). They aren't old enough to do that so until then, please don't share.

4. Emphasize many times that it's about protecting and empowering our kids. It's not about preventing her from showing off her grandchildren.

[MarkMarine]

We do this as well, specifically #1 we do through apple's private shared albums. It's quite good, we've got a big chunk of the family on there, so people comment as I assume they would on Facebook. This has assuaged their (proud grandparents) urge to post photos on their other social media, I think. I'm not on Facebook so I'm not positive what they are doing on there, but the banal comments that show up in the family feed remind me of why I'm not.

[jjulius]

I commented elsewhere and mentioned that #1 is the path we took. That said, while we encountered next to no resistance on this policy from our family, we've found that in practice, my mother really thrives on #2, to the point where I'm confident that our broader family/friends group gets pictures directly from her and hardly bothers visiting my private gallery.

[warner25]

Yeah, this has been a source of hurt feelings for my parents, my wife's parents, and the parents of many of our peers... Facebook-addicted Boomers literally crying, "But everyone else gets to put up pictures of their grandchildren!"

[prpl]

Grandparents have shared photos of their relatives, just usually through wallet photos in the past, email maybe later - so it probably feels like a small delta on that. Probably doesn’t help more of their lives are spent online than in person now.

I’d been printing off photos in various sizes (wallet to 8x10) and sending them along to my parents/grandparents - but it does take more effort to follow through. I do post photos of kids to a private account but maybe once or twice a year.

[warner25]

We upload and organize our family photos in a private Flickr album, and the grandparents have access to that. The presentation is beautiful and I update it at least once a month, so they should be able to enjoy it. If they pull up the album on their phone to show off some photos to a friend in-person, like they would've done in the past with a wallet photo, we're fine with that. Unfortunately, what they really want is the shower of Likes and comments from their 1,000+ Facebook "friends" (and God knows who else with their privacy settings).

[prpl]

I was also using iCloud shared photo album which was great until my mother switched to an android phone (in addition, lost true Facetime support which was also a bummer)

Ironically she switched to an android phone because she had too many photos I think and was always running out of storage. Of course the new phone had no photos, and her old phone would have been just fine if she was happy to start over too.

[avisser]

We got the grandparents Aura smart frames. It's trivial to add photos and short videos. They get to see a new pic of the kid almost every day.

As soon as anyone visits their house, they immediately see recent pics of the kid.

It's been a big winner.

[anotherparent]

I am a parent of a toddler and he’s only on Apple Photos, my wife and I don’t use social media.

That said, I expect to be downvoted into oblivion.

> anonymity is one of the best gifts I can give them

I don’t know, I mean a lot of parents tell themselves they are doing a lot of things, me included, that they have no control over in reality.

I sympathize with the parents who try to turn their kids into celebs. We made this celebs-rule world.

For every one person, kids or adults, who feels exposed online, there are 99,999 more toiling away in obscurity.

On this forum probably the children are going to be fine. Their parents are rich enough that even if you are not a nepo baby in the strictest sense of having a famous last name, they will be fine. They can do whatever and they will be fine.

If you’re some random person, obscurity is crushing. If you’re not a nepo baby and you have no above average cognitive gifts, which is 80% of people, getting some attention can change your life.

Most people have the level of drama, the stupidity, the vapidity of influencers. You just didn’t know that until TikTok. TikTok doesn’t cause this, it doesn’t even exacerbate it.

And social media DOES benefit them, it IS rational. It’s the textbook definition of elitism to tell people who found a little fame and like it that they aren’t like the smart kids or true blue nepo babies, who can be offline and still thrive in this world.

[brightlancer]

> TikTok doesn’t cause this, it doesn’t even exacerbate it.

I agree with the first but not the second. I think "social media" is a net good, by far. At the same time, there are negative effects: one is that it creates a constant audience for whatever stupid thing the Influencer wants to do or say, which is an incentive for them to say or do stupid things.

[kenjackson]

My sister has gone to this extreme, and I do feel like it is extreme. She doesn't allow her kids to do sports, for example, for fear of their name or image getting out. In contrast, as my kids play sports, most of their peers are trying to build their brand -- as NIL deals are almost directly correlated with your social media popularity.

To me this feels like the cell phone discussions of the mid-90s (people who refused to get cell phones because they didn't want to be constantly connected). Eventually almost everyone realizes that the world has changed. Unless you keep your kid from interacting with the world, there will eventually be little you can do to prevent them from having some online presence.

[ivraatiems]

I don't think your sister is where my friends are. They're not demanding schools not take class photos, or whatever. They're just asking people not to record their child and post them online without getting permission first. Most schools at least have you sign a release that outlines what the video/photos would be used for.

> In contrast, as my kids play sports, most of their peers are trying to build their brand -- as NIL deals are almost directly correlated with your social media popularity.

If the kid wants to "build their brand" with parental permission, that's one thing. It's another thing entirely for random people unrelated to the kid to record them and put it online.

[joshcanhelp]

Hard same on this. I didn’t think about it for the first few years of being a parent but, several years ago, I deleted all photos of my kids on social media, as well as a few random ones I had on my blog (followed soon after by deleting all non-professional social media content and accounts). Triggered by an article I read (I wish I’d kept it), it occurred to me that I didn’t have the right to use my kids’ images without their permission. All it once, it felt unfair and irresponsible. Soon after, my oldest asked me, after taking her picture, something to the effect of “is that going to be on the internet?” I was pleased to say “no, never.”

Aside: I wonder if it’s going to be a different experience for kids in the generations that have thousands of photos from their childhood available to them. As someone interested in knowing more about my past, I can’t help but to think it will be a good thing to know all the cool stuff they did, whether they remember it or not.

[rychco]

I try to do this for myself, & often request that nobody take photos of me if possible, but definitely to not to post images of me online without my explicit permission. Even amongst my close friends & family, it frequently causes friction & outright anger.

[jimt1234]

Same. I wish this was the default (don't post pics of me without my consent), but unfortunately it's not. People just expect that everyone wants to be blasted all over social media, and they get butt-hurt when I ask them to remove pics of me.

- Hey, thanks for inviting me to your wife's birthday party. I had a lot of fun. But could you please remove my pic from your Facebook post?

- Why did you show up in the first place? OR You're in a lot of the pics; I can't remove all of them. OR Are you too good to be seen in pics with my wife and her friends? OR Are you hiding from the law? Did you murder someone?

[temp_praneshp]

Do you actually phrase it as a request? I find that some social media averse people also tend to be curt/sharp with their requests (I totally understand the underlying concern though).

I feel like photos are nothing special, a lot of the friction/anger people are just responding to perceiving an accusatory tone. (But I'm willing to let the odd photo slide, so maybe dropping the worst arguments made life easier)

[ishjoh]

My wife and I do this for our kids. Photo albums are more fun anyways as looking through them and talking about the memories is more of an event then just getting a 'like' on a photo.

[tyfon]

We do this too for our kids. Now that they are a bit older they are very happy with our decision.

[dvt]

100% on the same page here, I plan on doing the same, and my sister does the same thing with her kid. Seems so weird to freely share intimately private pictures of children, family scenes, etc. on the open internet. They used to be tucked in grandma's photo album under the living room coffee table.

[blooalien]

> "Seems so weird to freely share intimately private pictures of children, family scenes, etc. on the open internet."

Weird and potentially dangerous as well. When I was a child, adults warned us about "stranger danger", but now parents advertise their children to potentially dangerous strangers…

What I find truly weird is how many people there are that don't find it "weird" or at all concerning in any way to openly share such photos so freely.

[jjulius]

We have a couple of young kiddos and we took the same approach. Family completely understands and has done a phenomenal job of respecting our request. What helped was meeting them halfway - we live away from most of our extended families, so I set up a private photo gallery on a subdomain on my personal website that family members can log into that I'll upload to once or twice a week.

[jtsuken]

Why not call your children John or Maria Smith at birth then? Wouldn't this guarantee almost full anonymity in most contexts?

The typical security precautions are very hard to maintain in real life. e.g. should your child win some spelling context or a regional crosscountry run or whatever, how would you explain to them that their name and photo are not appearing among all the other winners?

[oh_sigh]

If there are random pictures of their kids in the background of some photo posted to Facebook, how are they not anonymous anymore?

I'm reminded of the scene from Jurassic park, where nedry is chastised for using a man's name during a clandestine meeting at a restaurant, and nedry yells out "Dodgson! We got Dodgson here! See, nobody cares!"

[ivraatiems]

Nah, that's fine. It's more about specific photos of the kid.

[ashwagary]

>I completely support this and I intend to do something similar for my kids. Anonymity is one of the best gifts I can give them.

Same. There is something unsettling about willfully pushing kids into the attention economy, it can't be good for mental health long term and definitely assists nefarious actors build permanent profiles of them.

[jemmyw]

We did the same. My mother wasn't very understanding but she did comply. I think we caused her some issues because my sister posted on Facebook but it's all good now.

[katabasis]

Private shared photo albums in Apple Photos are great for this. I have a small child and my wife and I live far from our extended families. Sharing photos and videos of our daughter via a shared album gives the same immediacy as posting to social media does (you even have likes, comments, etc) but it's way more private.

As long as everyone has an Apple device it just works, and I assume there is probably a similar way to do this with a Google photo album (although I will say, I think Google is way more likely to do something sketchy like default everything to public or make it easy for someone to publish content accidentally).

[_madmax_]

That might be me you're talking about, I did exactly that when my kids were born.