You probably have noticed that there isn’t any photos of the subject on this site. Why? Well, it’s mainly because we believe that we don’t own the image of our son —we are just the stewards of it— and he is too young to decide for himself about whether we should post his pictures on the Internet. It’s probably going to be like that for the next 11 or so years —when we humans usually start to be real self-conscious about ourselves and we begin to have real memories1 so we have some kind of own accountability for our actions and decisions in the long term. However, we know what as he will grow up we are going to be less strict enforcing the rule and we also want to encourage the idea that sharing is good —in a degree, in the right moment and with the right tools— to our son.
Yeah, we, as parents, are in charge of his estate and in consequence we manage it until he is old enough to manage for himself. Part of his estate is his image. We don’t want to abuse it posting it online indiscriminately and we what to keep his personality and his story as neutral as possible. On the other hand, we are not against to share family pictures —being careful— on the Internet. We are just trying to be balanced.
All of this is pretty funny because just the other day someone posted in Reddit this meme:
And the problem is, as others have stated in the comments, that you really want to share photos and image of your kid(s) with others, but there is almost no place to do it for free,2 safely and in a open standard. The best solution would be create an online album only accessible with a password, but there is no easy alternative out there. One solution that comes to mind is to own-host a service like NextCloud on a Raspberry Pi, Synology or similar and share a folder with password protection.
We’ve been sharing / sending photos over WhatsApp to friends and family, but we’re not happy about that and it’s something we want to stop. Besides that we don’t like WhatsApp as communication method, we don’t consider it safe to share personal pictures of any kind on it.3 Even less of our kid. It’s true that it’s really convenient, since almost everyone in Europe has it. But we don’t like it. Luckily for us, our most closer family, our parents, have in our way or another Apple devices and we’ve been sharing with them images using iMessage, that in our opinion, although isn’t perfect, it’s much more safer.
We hope to sort out this conundrum in the near future and start easily and safely sharing photos of our son with our family, friends and acquaintances all around the world.
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I remember seeing an in interview with Carl Jung where we was saying that he became came self aware about the age of 9 when he walk out of a mist and became self aware. ↩
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Or without spending an incredible amount of money per year. ↩
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When you are an adult, or at least you know more or less what are you doing, you can do whatever you want on the Internet and send photos of yourself using whatever mean, but I don’t think it OK to send photos of a third person that he is not even self aware. ↩