October 21, 2011 – 5:29 PM
So, it’s a sorry state, but we’ll likely get her a Gmail account and monitor it ourselves until she is a bit older. I’m not overjoyed by this, but my baby is growing up.
Still, there are some parental tasks left to do, and first among them is choosing a screen name. There is nothing I could find online on this, except for one thin forum post on choosing a screen name. So here is what I’ve come up with as a guideline for my daughter:
1. No real names. She can use a nickname or some random word, but nothing that identifies her personally.
Another thing for my semi-privacy policy to-do list.
I’m not naive enough to think privacy is at all possible these days, and the government definitely can identify almost all of us using facial recognition. I’d just as soon though, that not every Tom, Dick, and Larry is able to identify me and my family.
If you haven’t seen it yet, Facebook’s new facial-recognition software is a crafty feature. Pass a cursor over a photo that you just uploaded to Facebook and, voila, the person’s name pops up like magic.
[From Facebook facial-recognition opt out: Here's how to opt out of Facebook's facial-recognition feature - latimes.com]
April 22, 2011 – 11:40 AM
I just had a good talk with Vincent DiCaro at the Fatherhood Initiative. They work to support involved dads and motivating others to be the best dads they can be. They are honoring military dads with a Military Dad Award. Please take a look if you know a military dad who deserves an added honor as a dad.
Along with all the costs of war, we also don’t talk much about the effect on families, kids and dads (and moms). Being a dad has many challenges, but I am grateful that one of mine is not trying to stay in touch with my family while dodging bullets. Our friend, Armin Brott, a former Marine, recently wrote a book on The Military Father to help dads and military families prepare for a deployment and manage the situation as best they can. The Fatherhood Initiative also has materials to help military dads.
Very thought provoking study out of internet security firm AVG shows what we all know to be true. Kids’ names, images, and history are going up on the internet, and forever public long before they can approve of it:
- 4% of children have their sonograms uploaded to the internet
- The average age at which a child acquires an online presence is six months
- By the age of two, 92% of children in the U.S. have some sort of digital footprint
While, of course, the survey is a tad self-serving since AVG is in this business, the results are interesting if only because they force you to pause a minute and realize how early in our lives (pre-birth) we are online.
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December 21, 2010 – 10:15 PM
DadLabs tackles the subject of kids, cyberspace and your family’s social media strategy. Find out which sites exist that can introduce kids to social media technology and allow them to connect with friends.
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