Your Wife May Be Pimpin Your Kid on the Net

You have ventured into their turf. You have seen them armed with their words of smiting and clad in +19 armor of contempt. You may have attempted to engage them in battle only to learn of their tendency to combine together like red, blue, green, yellow and “I’ll-form-the-head” black lion into a Voltron-like presence capable of devastating even the most determined, logical and reasonable foes. Even before the battle rages, each of them waves their internet family crests in a glorious display of hypocrisy. You see, these (primarily) extremely righteous women who would gnaw a predator’s flesh down to the bone if they so much as laid an eyeball on their kids, are unwittingly tossing them into the middle of the (information super) highway.

Noodads, I am bringing this up because it could be your wife.

That’s right, I am talking about the participants in so many online communities who feel the need to sign every single post with a 600X200 jpeg of their kids. Forget about making the site look like a yard full of broken down cars and washing machines, the people who participate in these sites are giving out identifying information on their kids and their whereabouts to people they do not even know. Often adoption boards list personal details like the names of DH (dear husband), DD (daughter), DS (son) etc, the date they sent their dossier to a country, the login date and the bring home date. Why is this necessary? This is private information people! It is not a parent’s right to compromise the security of their kids.

Of course the retort is that “This ain’t myspace.com! All the preds are THERE looking for teenagers.” They will also tell you that these are so-called private sites and that they know the people who frequent the forums. To this I ask: what about the IAoE*?? Google, Yahoo and MSN are crawling your site and putting it into their organic search results if it is linked to at least one other site. What about the lurkers who never post anything and watch your every move? You need an example? This was a response to Noodad’s article on co-sleeping . While some of the things they say about our boy Noo may very well be true (yeah, they took the bait) and their kids are totally cute, I feel bad because I know that there may be folks looking at this page who are not “good”. It is not even about whether folks are good or not. I know Noodad and I will vouch for him being a stand up guy. I would trust him and his wife with both of my kids. That said, these folks think he is a complete wacko . They do not like Noodad (or presumably me by association) and yet they showed me their pictures. WTF?!?!

The Internet, like any place, has a dark side. The difference is that it is a lot easier to take stuff on the net to the dark side. Surfing safely requires that you do not post your personal information including kids’ names, birthdays and pictures to public sites on the net. You should also password protect your own family related blogs and galleries to limit viewing. You can install a site meter to see who is referring to your site. If you are linked by another site, change up the URL of the page being linked. Search the IAoE often for your own family and see if you can find it. If you do not like what you see, get the stuff taken down. If you really want to be safe, you can use OpenPGP (Pretty Good Privacy), www.gnupg.org (for free), to encrypt every picture you send to friends and family. This will ensure that only the people you want to see your photos will be able to do so.

Fight Kid Pimpin’!

*Big Daddy this is the Internet Axis of Evil, not Isolated Area of Effect.