My wife and I recently welcomed the birth of our first child, a perfect little girl. As fate would have it, we both have very big families, whom were equally anxious to see and greet our little one. Slowly but surely, we started Facetiming with the excited bunch. Somehow, without fail, the same question would arrive: “why haven’t you sent any pictures?”
We are, of course, very proud of our precious little gift. She was born with lots of hair, and the cutest set of cheeks on this planet. But we don’t want to share any of the hundreds of pictures we’ve already taken of her. My wife has her own concerns for why she’d like to refrain from doing so and knowing what I know as a Software Engineer I have my own as well.
No Control
The first thing that I’ve come to realize is how remarkably little recourse we have to prevent anyone from obtaining a picture they aren’t meant to have. There’s no native mechanism to prevent someone from taking a screen-grab of an image. Even if there were a code-based solution to prevent native print-screen or obfuscate the image source and prevent a direct image download, it’s meaningless when anyone can simply reach into their pocket and snap a pretty decent, high-res facsimile. Perhaps that’s why a viable solution doesn’t exist?
We do, however, have software that prevents native screen recording when copyrighted material is being displayed. Of course this still doesn’t solve the cell-phone recording problem, but we at least know that something could be done. Many of the most popular video services will analyze your uploaded content to detect any copyrighted material, and prevent it from being disseminated if any is found. Why can’t we have similar protections for images that are shared across any medium, whether it be via text, messenger, or email? We could adopt recent messaging innovations like self-destructing messages, maximum number of forwards, and editing after sending for image files. Maybe we don’t have these protections yet because there isn’t enough money to be made, or lost, from them.
Even something as simple as password protecting an image, while technically possible, isn’t as simple to do in practice. Sure, it can be achieved by converting the image to a PDF and password protecting it. But I doubt many people know this functionality exists (maybe I don’t know enough people).
Then there’s the matter of being able to do this easily from a cellphone, as that’s the primary computing device for many folks, and frankly where most of the images that need protecting are being created. Finally, there’s the matter of being able to unlock the file with the password once you’ve received it. It’s unreasonable of me to expect my friends and family to have to use these passwords I’ve set. Besides, they can be shared which also defeats the purpose.
Stranger Danger
Once I hit send, I don’t know where these pictures I’m sharing will eventually end up. The nightmare scenario is that a despicable pedophile gets a hold of them.
Equally as bad, but not as terrible, someone from my past sees this blessing, and may not have the best of wishes at heart for us.
Having experienced the early days of social media as an adult, I’ve grown weary of oversharing. So much so, that my Instagram profile has only a handful of posts for all of 2021. Somehow, the older I get, the more of life’s moments that fall under that category.
While I don’t post much nowadays, I must admit I would love it if I could record every single second of every single interaction with my baby to relive any time. But I know that ultimately it strips away a little bit of what makes these moments so special. It’s all too easy to focus on getting “just the right angle”, or waiting in anticipation for that really cute thing they do, instead of living in the moment and beginning to form those lifelong bonds with your child. As the TikTok video above has made disturbingly clear, capturing these picture perfect moments just to share on social media can often have unintended consequences and shouldn’t be a priority. At the end of the day, children just need our love and attention, not the love (likes) they may garner online.
From a more ethical point of view…
children cannot provide consent for having their picture taken. Today, those consent-less photos are then uploaded to services like Google Photos, or Apple iCloud, where machine learning algorithms do all sorts of things. Some are seemingly benign, like learning to identify a child’s face as they progress through life. Others, like learning to identify potential CSAM images have the potential to ruin your life if you’re a concerned father trying to get remote care for your child during a pandemic. Obviously, these CSAM protections are better than nothing, I’m not advocating for their removal. I simply wish images containing children were handled with more careful consideration and restraint. These children are people too, and when they grow up, they may not like the idea that their face is known to faceless, world-spanning, mega-corporations.
What’s a dad to do?
At some point, she’ll attend birthday parties, have play dates, or meet up with her proud family members, where her picture will inevitably be taken, and which I have no control over. The pictures in these devices will then end up God knows where, analyzed by some server, somewhere, on the internet, probably till the end of time. Does that mean I should just accept the status quo? Or should I fight, even if it’s as small as not sharing any pictures with loved ones?
In a world that’s becoming increasingly digital, am I being reasonable or crazy?
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