The risks of oversharing: putting their youngsters at danger

When my friend's baby was born, she created a Facebook page for her. This is despite the fact that child privacy laws restrict Facebook from registering profiles for anyone under the age of 13.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

She has, in fact, uploaded numerous images of her daughter, including metadata such as location, date, and time, as well as other persons in the snap. This highlights common destinations like childcare and parks.

My issue is triangular. For starters, the child could become the target of a predator who uses mountains of metadata to pursue the child and eventually compel them into some illicit behavior.

Second, I'm concerned about the child's future autonomy. We all went through a moment in our early adolescence when we tried to separate ourselves from our families and develop our own identities. How much more difficult would that be if your entire life up to that moment had already been told to you by someone else? Will it slow down the process of emotional maturation?.

Finally, I'm concerned about the philosophical implications of having someone barcoded the day they're born in order for them to become the ideal capitalist customer. After all, Facebook's entire goal is to target you with advertisements and sell your data to market researchers. 

Someone else has basically decided for her that her right to privacy and permission to monitoring are irrelevant, and the choice is irreversible. Despite the abundance of 'delete' buttons dotting Facebook's settings, none of it truly deletes data from Facebook's servers, only from public view.

I confronted her about the situation and expressed my concerns. She said that it was fine because she kept the profile's privacy settings tight and only connected it with selected friends and family. In the months after that talk, I've discovered that she is completely unaware of the depth and complexity of Facebook's privacy settings, as well as the effort they make to confound and obfuscate the user's capacity to make decisions about their data. So, no, she is most likely not using the profile's tightest settings. Even still, they aren't tight enough in my opinion.

Regarding simply having "selected friends and family" linked to the account, I believe this is irrelevant for a variety of reasons. Primarily, she tags images profusely, causing these photos to be disseminated with a far bigger range of people than she anticipates. If she tags a faraway friend in a photo with her daughter, the shot is broadcast on that friend's timeline and viewable to all of their friends. 

When you choose friends, you are essentially choosing friends of friends, over whom you have no control. People friend everyone, therefore photos can easily spread over the network to strangers all over the world.

When I brought up the latter point, she grew defensive and reverted to an argument that I found highly troubling. "It's my daughter, I'll make the decisions," she basically declared. I am not disputing a parent's right to parent. 

What I'm arguing is that children are not their parents' possessions and have their own rights in addition to their parents', that they are autonomous people from the moment they are born, and that you as a parent are effectively just their guardian, raising and protecting them from all threats until they can defend and protect themselves.

How can a 2-year-old defend oneself against an insatiable international multinational corporation? How can a person justify gambling with another person's rights without their consent?