Posts Tagged ‘mothers’

  Where is privacy going?  Do all newborns have digital footprints in addition to those inky-stained ones on birth certificates? Are we going to need pre-natal reputation managers in the near future?

A survey by AVG  among mothers in several countries found that 81% of children under the age of two had some form of digital profile including photos online. This percentage was even greater in the US where an astounding 92% of children under two have an online profile.  It gets even stranger so hold on. Nearly one quarter — one in four! — have uploaded their pre-birth sonograms online. Again, US moms are more prone to sonogram-posting (34%).  Is technology getting out of hand? And nearly one in 10 (7%) moms have picked out an email address for their young ones with nearly as many having a social network profile already.

Privacy has to be among the greatest risks facing humankind as we march into the future. Parents have to learn to be extra cautious with their privacy controls if they want to maintain some sort of safeguard for their growing children. Of course, young parents today have only known life online.

All of this makes me wonder if  in year 2050, we have to employ baby reputation managers to protect our children’s backgrounds and photographs from being used improperly?

We have a lot of work ahead to understand the true dimensions of privacy loss and how it will affect this generation coming up. We have already seen the downsides (along with the upsides of course) in recent years but the early warning signs of concern are here.