• I remember back in the 2000s, my favourite cousin had a baby and posted pictures of her daily. On MySpace. It was cute until she posted a picture of the toddler running naked through a sprinkler. She got a phone call over that one. Not that it wasn’t adorable, but she had no idea that perverts would be following her to collect pictures like that. So I had to have a talk with her about The Internet. She didn’t stop posting pictures of her baby every day. She just didn’t post the naked ones anymore. Swimsuit though? No problem. I wouldn’t have posted that, either, but, I already had the talk with her. I wasn’t going to keep pushing the issue. This was way before AI was an issue. The only issue I had was people following her to get the pictures… and using details in the picture to find where they lived.

  • 15 hours

    Problem is how do you get these people that are addicted to social media to stop posting the kids? Lots of parents see having a kid as the posting goldmine and all they want to do is post them so everyone thinks they have a cute kid or grandkid.

    I’ve tried to stop people in my life from doing it and they just don’t get it. They look at me like I am crazy. I understand the dopamine hit, but it’s not innocent like in the 2010s. I think until these people see what can actually be created with an innocent photo, they will never stop.

    Unfortunately some peoples whole lives are posting and they won’t accept reality.

    • I had to literally beg and plead with my mom to stop posting pictures of me without permission. She didnt stop until i was like 23 or 24

    • back …ten years ago, I used to post my toddler a lot. When he was 4 or 5 he asked me not to. I stopped.

      a year or so later deleted all my socials anyway.

      Respect your kids!

    • 15 hours

      They will never get it, until they are maimed, scarred, raped, abducted, and robbed.
      Until they suffer consequences of exposure, they will neven comprehend the sanctity of privacy.

    • And how do we know that photos stored in Google Drive aren’t being fed into AI training, even if they aren’t shared?

  • Thing is, the problem is more widespread - everyone should be more careful what kind of photo theyre sharing online.

  • I assumed this was just common sense anyway, even before Elon Musk created Grok.

    • The average person’s sense of online privacy has largely disappeared from when I was a kid and the early internet was taking off. We went from “never share any personal information” to “provide your full name, date of birth, zip code, phone number, and picture of your ID” to make an account on nearly any website in just two decades.

    • That’s the funny thing about common sense, it’s not as common as you’d think or like it to be.

      • 15 hours

        Yeahhh, a lot of people still believe in this myth.
        It’s our curse of knowledge to be aware that nothing will ever be safe posted online.

  • I don’t k ow why they ever did! Did parents just forget basic rules of the internet? I know, they did, the fake “private” modes really tricked them hook line and sinker

      • I’m very sorry, you had pictures thrown out into the internet of you?

        I’m fully on board with laws that make it illegal to post pictures of your kids publicly. It’s so selfish in my eyes, the kid has no say at all and they will be followed by those pictures for decades. They only think about themselves, look at our baby, look at us parents. Never “will our future child be happy with us posting them”.

        I think it should be minimum approved to sue the shit out of them for doing it.

        • 2 hours

          Not just. But yeah. I have the curse of knowledge that Meta wrote a shadow profile about me, and because I live in a panoptic state, everything about me is tracked and monitored. I didn’t consent to either oppressions, but found it extremely wild that if my parents survived abductions, gangs, and their own parental abuses, they couldn’t think one step further “maybe we shouldn’t create Meta accounts to talk about our family even if people make false rumors about us.” Boomers really fucked us up.