Hide Your Kids?
The thorny questions raised by today's bad internet
I posted a photo of myself visibly very pregnant to Instagram the other week. It was taken at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which is funny because I have not written a book. I was there instead helping support the book release of my work colleagues by asking them snotty questions like whether what was in their book was worth the lives of the trees that had to die in order to print it. But all of the panelists at the festival were photographed, book or not, and that’s how I ended up in the LATFOB sideshow alongside actual renowned authors like Blippy and Tiffani Amber Thiessen.
The photo I’d posted was the first thing resembling an “announcement” I’d put on any durable social media apart from this niche parenting-specific Substack, although I’d mentioned the pregnancy on my podcast and on my Instagram stories. It was something people who were paying attention to my internet footprint would have noticed; not something a random person could have just stumbled upon.
It wasn’t that I was trying to hide the pregnancy per se; on one hand, I just didn’t feel like making a huge deal out of it. There have been more hiccups and complications this time around, and the anxiety of dealing with that, plus the demands of working and toddler-wrangling haven’t left me with much energy left in the tank to come up with a cutesy way to tell the world that yes, I am reproducing again.
Besides, according to the Washington Post, the new pregnancy announcement is no announcement. Gone are the days of the clever poem possibly containing a weird double entendre about the baby’s father’s sperm’s motility, or a customizable image of a calligraphy chalkboard downloaded from Instagram for $2.99. No, one day there’s suddenly a post of a new baby alongside the caption “New baby just dropped.”
Even a baby hard launch seems to be falling out of favor. A couple years back— pre-COVID, which will always be “two years ago” in my mind, even though it was longer— I’d see people I’d known from other parts of my life post troves of identifying information alongside their baby announcements– the hospital where the baby was born, the baby’s full legal name, birth weight, date and time of birth– enough information for a savvy bad actor to get started on the path toward stealing the kid’s identity. Now, people are a bit more discerning, waiting a few days or weeks, keeping information to a minimum. First name only, baby’s face partially or fully obscured, a quick status update on how the mother is doing.
Maybe people have figured out more private ways to inform loved ones of the details– private apps, email lists, old fashioned USPS postcard announcements, group texts– or maybe a lot of people are simultaneously growing uncomfortable with the idea of their children’s faces being scraped and gathered by data brokers from birth. Data brokers at best.
Over the weekend, the New Yorker published an essay by Jia Tolentino about her attempt to hide her second pregnancy from her phone, wanting to reclaim some privacy during a time in most women’s lives when they are particularly scrutinized and surveilled. She didn’t purchase or google anything pregnancy- or baby- related, stayed away from parenting message boards, and had her partner do the same. She saw no ads for several months, and after speaking to a data privacy expert, characterized the experiment as having gone “surprisingly smoothly” and declared it over.
Pregnant women, as Tolentino notes, are particularly valuable to data brokers. We are a lucrative target audience; in the market for products and services that we will actually need, and, because pregnancy and parenthood are so wildly unpredictable and uncontrollable, are easily convinced to channel some of that anxiety into making purchases that we do not need. Some of those products and services can generate massive amounts of data about the babies they are supposed to protect and the parents whose fears they are supposed to assuage. Newborn baby care tracker apps, health monitor socks, even those Hatch sound machines that require an app to work could be taking our data and selling it.
I’m a lifelong Luddite and tech skeptic, but the baby-industrial complex is ever funneling parents toward giving them as much data as possible. When Juniper was a little baby, I never had an app-enabled monitor and gave up using my Huckleberry app after a couple of weeks because I found inputting data to be just another thing to do that I didn’t actually need to be doing. I resent my Hatch app— an app to operate a goddamn sound machine— but I use it when I’m too lazy to go to the next room over and turn the gentle sound of ocean waves off. There are app-enabled baby swings, educational toys, thermometers. (I’ve complained about this at length before; it’s ridiculous.)
I’ve given up caring if data brokers are scraping and selling my data to advertisers hungry to sell me electric swings and diaper subscriptions; they are wasting their resources. With my second baby, I already know exactly what I will need and exactly where I will buy it, because this isn’t my first rodeo. I will wash my first daughter’s little newborn clothes and use them on my second. I will give her the toys we already have. I know that it doesn’t make sense to mass buy a bottle or pacifier brand before the baby arrives because babies decide what they like and parents have very little say. I already have a car seat. I’m borrowing a friend’s bassinet. I was fooled into over-purchasing the first time around; there will be no second fooling. We have no nursery; we have no theme. The theme is “survive.”
(I did, however, get a prophylactic Zoloft prescription this time, to help manage the PPD that hit me like a rage bus after my first. Like I said, I won’t be fooled again.)
I may not care about what happens with my data – that ship has sailed– but I do care about how much of my baby the data brokers and AI machines and elbow grease online weirdos will have access to. Other parents seem to be coming to the same realization on roughly the same timeline– putting kids online is mostly downside.
It’s not just the spectre of our children being labeled as little consumers and having targeted ads served to them from birth. At the risk of sounding Qanon, the way predators seem to peruse social media accounts like Doordash menus also makes me want to bar all internet-enabled photo-capturing technology from a 50 foot radius of my home until my daughters are old enough to operate a taser.
A disturbing piece in the New York Times a few months back outlined how a significant audience for child influencers appears to be adult men who are interested in sexualized images of children.
Thousands of accounts examined by The Times offer disturbing insights into how social media is reshaping childhood, especially for girls, with direct parental encouragement and involvement. Some parents are the driving force behind the sale of photos, exclusive chat sessions and even the girls’ worn leotards and cheer outfits to mostly unknown followers. The most devoted customers spend thousands of dollars nurturing the underage relationships.
The large audiences boosted by men can benefit the families, The Times found. The bigger followings look impressive to brands and bolster chances of getting discounts, products and other financial incentives, and the accounts themselves are rewarded by Instagram’s algorithm with greater visibility on the platform, which in turn attracts more followers.
One calculation performed by an audience demographics firm found 32 million connections to male followers among the 5,000 accounts examined by The Times.
Instagram is like a Candyland for creeps. But worse for those of us who don’t see our children as little cash machines– the Times investigation found that engagement with child material meant to cater to the whims of pedophiles in a kind of wink-wink, nudge-nudge way would lead those users to similar images on their “discover” page– public images of children in dance leotards, eating popsicles, frolicking through sprinklers. Photos those children’s parents probably never intended for the same audience that flocks to the page of, say, the child model whose stage mom is routinely accused of creating content exclusively for adult men with an inappropriate level of appreciation for photographs of children.
Photos posted to social media get stolen and repurposed all the time. What’s stopping harvested photos of children from random, well-intentioned if a bit tech-unsavvy parents from becoming treated as essentially fair use stock images? Will making pages private protect children from having their images collected and swapped among creeps? Do we really trust Meta, a company that has dragged its feet on stopping genocidal disinformation and is currently sourcing god-knows-what content other people created to power its own AI, to prioritize the privacy of personal photos in order to protect children from harm? Even when the Times pointed out what was happening to the company, Meta did just about as little as it possibly could.
Account owners who report explicit images or potential predators to Instagram are typically met with silence or indifference, and those who block many abusers have seen their own accounts’ ability to use certain features limited, according to the interviews and documents. In the course of eight months, The Times made over 50 reports of its own about questionable material and received only one response.
Meta, Instagram’s parent company, found that 500,000 child Instagram accounts had “inappropriate” interactions every day, according to an internal study in 2020 quoted in legal proceedings.
Some parents have gone as far as to hide their children from the internet as though their faces should be as fiercely guarded as their social security numbers. The first time I saw an Instagram mutual who wasn’t a celebrity hide their kid’s face behind a blown up emoji, I thought it was a little much. Who did they think they were, Kerry Washington?
But the more I’ve learned about the galaxy of data collectors operating in every virtual space, hoovering up whatever data it can, the more I thought they were onto something. Who’s to say that whatever data is being collected about your kid’s face isn’t going into a database that one day police will use to determine they were at a protest? (Clearview AI, which mines photos from social media, already works with police departments. If you’re on Facebook, they have your face.) Who’s to say that facial recognition of children who were liberally posted online won’t one day help authorities locate their parents when their parents are, say, late paying a medical bill or a parking ticket? Or mistaken for somebody who has?
The era of family vloggers working their children like Nickelodeon stars seems to be coming to an end. But like single-use plastic water bottles or going to church, sharenting (sharing + parenting, natch) has been “coming to an end” for years now.
Cosmopolitan just ran a series of features called “The Sharenting Reckoning Is Here,” on the ways in which influencer parents are either rethinking or doubling down on posting their children for financial gain.
A handful of states are considering laws that would mandate children of family vlogs be entitled to some of the profit they generated; other states are weighing laws that would cap the number of hours children are allowed to work creating content for their families.
And whether or not their parents ever made money off them, children who grow up with enormous digital footprints they didn’t consent to don’t seem grateful for it when they become adults. There are many, many articles covering the sharenting backlash featuring quotes from young adults who grew up with parents who plastered their intimate lives online. And even if those kids weren’t generating the sort of views that could buy a family of 7 a sprawling exurban McMansion and a lifted white extended cab truck, nobody seems particularly happy that their parents treated them like a reliable way to generate the sort of cheap dopamine high that comes along with getting a lot of attention.
Social media is especially unhealthy for girls. We know this. Researchers keep finding this. It makes little girls feel like shit, like they need to edit and smooth their skin and digitally cinch their waists in order to keep up with all of their peers and influencers who are doing the same thing.
Publicly posting excessive images of one’s own children is starting to feel like a habit we know is bad, but that we can’t collectively kick. Like centering our social lives around alcohol consumption, or borrowing money to finance a wedding.
Pondering the question, “What do social media companies want with our kids,” the mind quickly becomes a dystopian short story collection, or the cutting room floor from a season of Black Mirror. There are a million good reasons to keep children’s faces off the internet and only a few good reasons to post them.
Does all this mean that the only ethical way for a parent to represent themselves online is to hide their children, or pretend that they don’t exist? Can social media be a safe place for parents to find community or reinforce the bonds of a “village” with people who are too far away to frequently visit in person?
I don’t know if private apps are the answer. Frankly, I don’t trust that they’re not scooping up, packaging, and selling data off, even if the terms of service assure me that my photos will remain private. What’s to prevent a future buyer from saying never mind to all that and sending me one of those “TOS HAVE BEEN UPDATED” emails that get filtered right to spam?
In 2020, Ancestry.com, a site that analyzes users’ DNA to suggest where their ancestors came from and who they’re related to, was sold to a private equity firm for $4.7 billion. The largest trove of genetic information in the world, which users willingly submitted and paid to have analyzed, in the hands of a business that juices acquisitions for all their worth and then sells them off for parts. If children’s faces are valuable, someone will try to sell them.
I’ve long been conflicted about what to share and not share of my kid. We don’t have family nearby. Friends are flung far and wide. In my line of work, where I have a friendly relationship with my readers and listeners. I know that sharing something about Juniper on social media is a way to stay in touch with people I don’t normally see in person but who have been following along with what I’ve shared of my life.
I have some ground rules for what I share of her. I rarely share photos of her face straight on outside of a “close friends” circle. She’s always wearing clothes, and never doing anything that the Times girl influencer piece referenced as “suggestive”— although it’s infuriating that as a parent, I even need to ask myself, Would a perv like this? before sharing a photo of my two-year-old. I don’t share photos of her that she would find embarrassing later in life. I don’t post photos of other people’s kids.
Sometimes the grunt work of parenting makes it difficult to step back and appreciate the small person growing up under my roof. Sometimes sharing a cute photo of her and having other people tell me that she brings them joy helps shake me out of that. Look how big she’s getting! Look how much she looks like her dad, with my personality poured directly into her! Listen to her sing! My life revolves around her, and omitting her entirely from the way I represent my life would feel dishonest.
And I enjoy seeing my friends’ kids grow up, too, albeit from far away. There are a handful of people who I know I would have lost touch with years ago, if not for the fact that we can sometimes use Instagram to chat about our families. Is the risk of harm from this sort of engagement big enough to justify cutting it off entirely?
And I know that, in an era of climate change and political unrest, chances are the toddlers of today will soon have much bigger fish to fry than the fact that they’ve been tracked and marketed to and perhaps even served as fodder in the development of AI for their entire lives. As parents, surely there’s some place between the isolation of total privacy and tech’s endless nefarious exploitation of people’s desire to connect.
But, every day, it all makes me more and more uneasy. My god, are we fucking up?