We Post Nothing About Our Daughter Online

Facebook updated its privacy policy again. It reads in part: “We are able to suggest that your friend tag you in a picture by scanning and comparing your friend’s pictures to information we’ve put together from your profile pictures and the other photos in which you’ve been tagged.” Essentially, this means that with each photo upload, parents are, unwittingly, helping Facebook to merge their children’s digital and real worlds.

Algorithms will analyze the people around the kids, the references made to them in posts, and over time will determine their most likely inner circle. Parents are preventing kids from any hope of future anonymity. Myriad applications, websites, and wearable technologies are relying on face recognition today, and ubiquitous bio-identification is only just getting started. In 2011, a group of hackers built an app that let you scan faces and immediately display their names and basic biographical details, right there on your mobile phone. Already developers have made a working facial recognition API for Google Glass. While Google has forbidden official facial recognition apps, it can’t prevent unofficial apps from launching. There’s huge value in gaining real-time access to view detailed information the people with whom we interact. The easiest way to opt-out is to not create that digital content in the first place, especially for kids.