I decided to make my mommy blog (see sig) private. This was after seeing some stuff on The Bump about how there are weirdos out there who role play with babies’ pictures, etc. Plus, I probably post way too much stuff on there that happens on my kids’ specific birthdates and things like that.
Has anybody else blogged publicly about their kids and regretted it for any specific reasons? What made you think twice? Am I being paranoid? I’m still waffling on whether to leave it public, I guess.
I don’t think there are too many people who read it regularly anyway, besides family members (and of course, my aunt and namesake of the blog). But it seems like things are really changing from, say, a decade ago, when people used to post stuff about their kids all the time without much worry about whether someone would ever take the time to wade through all of the digital information out there for theirs specifically.
Anyway, If you’re reading this and suddenly feel deprived and want to subscribe to my blog, PM me and I’ll “invite” you.
Update: I just searched the name of my blog and hit “images”. It would seem this privacy thing is futile at this point, especially for the baby pictures.
Quick tip: Google Images has a reverse image search. Upload a photo, and you should be able to find anywhere that it has (but hopefully hasn’t!) been posted online.
I talked to my husband a little about it, and we’re just going to let the blog stay public, keeping in mind that once the images are out there, they’re out there.
The only time I ever had a blog (now lying dormant) was for a few years when I moved to Iceland initially and I was an au pair for some of that time. I never posted pictures with the kids’ faces and I never used their names. But of course they weren’t my own children so it was a different situation.
I put pictures of my daughter on Facebook but never in ‘public’ posts, including my profile pic and cover pic which are automatically public.
Having said all that, I do think it’s highly unlikely that anything bad would happen to a child because there was a picture of it online. The people children are in most danger from are always family members and other people who are already in personal contact with them. I don’t believe for a second that anybody who wants to hurt children in any way is trawling blogs on the internet for victims. There almost definitely are weirdos who would do the sort of ‘role-playing’ you describe, which is super creepy and yes the idea makes me uncomfortable, but at the end of the day doesn’t matter all that much. Nobody really gets hurt.
I also live in a country where everyone’s full name, date of birth and official address is public information accessible to everyone else. It doesn’t cause problems. I think you need a little more than that to pull off identity fraud or something, otherwise it would be rife here.