Internet Safety

[atid254]

We are expecting our first child this Spring and I am preparing how best to share pictures with family and friends or information about the growth of our first child, the first grandchild, and the first great-grandchild in the family. We are trying to think about some of the ramifications of using websites or whatnot that are accessible to everyone.

How have you shared your pictures with friends & family? Have you used Google's Picassa, Yahoo's Flickr or have you stayed with a more password protected option such as Kodak, Snapfish, or even Facebook?

Have you created blogs to discuss your experience and recap the baby's first year of life for family and friends to see how things have progressed?

If we create a digital presence for our children from before they are born, what are the long-term ramifications of having such a presence?

[Anonymous]

The nice thing about Snapfish, Kodak, etc. is that extended family can actually order pics of photos they are interested in. And you limit who you share these with yourself.

[Anonymous]

Not true with Kodak Gallery - when you share your photos with friends and family, they are then free to forward that email to anyone they choose, who also gets to see your pictures. Once you've chosen those particular photos to share, pretty much anyone who gets that invitation email (whether from you or a forward) can see the pics. You can request that whoever views your pics sign in and so that way you can tell who's viewed your pics based on their email address, but it won't restrict people from viewing.

If anyone knows otherwise, please do share. I'd love to restrict the pics to just my direct invitees.

[Anonymous]

What about blog sites?

[Anonymous]

I upload everything to shutterfly to share with parents/grandparents.
However, our main form of "picture communication" is through my blog. I use blogspot.
I have the top privacy setting - so no one except those that are invited can log on w/ a password.

[Anonymous]

We use a mac so have dot mac membership (.mac). That gives us a website & we can publish our photos on it or else on a web gallery. Both can be password protected. We give the password to family and friends. No it still means if they forward that information to other people then they can access but I am trusting enough that my family and friends arne't going to send the information to paedophiles. We looked into this for ages and mac was the easiest to use and we figured the safest.

[Anonymous]

Flickr apparently allows companies to re-use photos posted on there. There was an article in the NYTimes recently about everyday people having their pictures used in national and international ads without them knowing. Kind of disturbing, if you ask me.

[Anonymous]

Smugmug, with a password which I give only to people I want to view the pictures. We also opted to not have our site show up in a search.