Here’s a non-paywalled link to an article published in the Washington Post a few days ago. It’s great to see this kind of thing getting some mainstream attention. Young children have not made an informed decision about whether they want their photos posted online.
Interesting how there are so many mentions of people worried about AI and only sharing photos in closed groups on Instagram/Facebook. I’m not sure that’s actually keeping the photos away from AI.
I think a large part of their concern is AI-altered photos generated by an individual.
Came here to say this. If you upload pictures to instagram, they are already being processed by Facebook (“Meta”). If you have an online backup of your photos Google/Apple cloud, then they are alredy being processed.
As the internet gets scarier
How the fuck is the internet getting scarier? This isn’t the random gore and porn filled, go to a forum and immediately get targeted by a sex-predator, internet that I grew up with. The internet is a corporate walled garden of mega services that feed disinformation and bullshit to people, but your odds of getting genuinely victimized as a child are so much lower than they used to be.
I think it is just a different scary. It is less predators snatching you up in their white van and more social media is totally screwing with people’s heads. It is more addictive than ever before. People are have para social relationships with online personalities. All photos you see online have been edited and changed to make them look better. Creating huge body image issues. And that is just the stuff I can think of off the top of my head.
And the preditor in the white van hasn’t actually gone away. Their have been some very questionables things over the years that have gotten some news coverage. Spiderman and Elisa shit, some very very questionable Musicly/TikTok video with kids, I have heard about some kids doing ASMR videos. Minecraft YouTubers seem to always end up grooming some kids.
Bottom line the Internet be scary. Stay safe and definitely don’t let kids be unattended.
It was explained in the first paragraph:
A month after her son was born, Samantha Taylor, 30, and her husband came to a realization: They didn’t want photos of their child posted online. They worried about how quickly artificial intelligence was advancing and how the photos could be used in addition to “creeps online in general.
IMO the “getting scarier” is the swinging back part. Grew up in the same time, my parents were big on “No identifying information to anyone on the internet!” I joke with them now that their generation, the ones that told us to stay off post all their business on facebook and the like.
But that’s the thing, you have a small segment of society that was the internet nerds that didn’t trust anything on the internet, hid themselves and the like, but now like you say it’s the corporate walled garden that’s sanitized and happy, which makes that veneer of trust. And boy do people trust it, posting anything and everything.
Odds are lower in percentages of being genuinely victimized as a child, but the lack of paying attention what’s posted has lead to a lot of effects, so people are getting worried again.
Those where more, how should I put it, ‘visual’ and ‘tangible’ threads. Now it’s watch out or someone is aggregating all your infornation about you and will use it for some neferarious things…
Which I find is a much wider issue, but is also much more dificult to warn and protect.Lol, no. Very accessible AI tools can make the pictured kids do whatever the fuck the creator wants. It’s easier than ever to steal identities and ruin lives. The internet still is full of porn and gore but that hardly is the problem. Also, brainwashing via social media is a really big and scary problem. The internet absolutely is scarier then aver before.
My friends keep my photos offline too.
Anything that’s genuinely good, is good in more ways than just “for the children”.
Still on iCloud, Google Drive and OneDrive. No way these people know how to store photos offline on their phone.
I think it would be cool if there was more products that allowed this
Here in Belgium it’s been pretty much the norm, both in friends groups or in institutions like schools that ask more formally, that one does not post photos online without the consent of all participants, including that of kids and their guardians. This is particularly the case for sharing publicly e.g Facebook post but also WhatsApp group.
It’s a mess but habits are changing at scale.
Storing offline is great and all, but I hope everyone is storing on multiple disks at multiple locations…
Yer didn’t think so, I’m sure photos are being lost.
No backup? No pity!
At our place we only share photos of the kids with grandparents/aunts/uncles via group chat. They’re the only group that “necessarily” needs to see the kids.
Let me guess, the group chat is WhatsApp or iMessage, so Facebook or Apple gets to see them too.
Not even close—it’s Skype! We aren’t able to teach a 98yo great grandma to use something else from overseas, so Microsoft gets the cake.
Well its better that posting it publicly
I share via Signal, and with links to my Immich instance (sent over Signal). Certainly susceptible to security problems since yours truly set it up, but what you gonna do…
Do you set up any Immich accounts for family members with shared albums? I’m currently using Piwigo but thinking about migrating to Immich. I wish the Immich app supported individual photo uploads instead of syncing whole albums.
I just use one account.
I share my photos with friends and family using a normal webhost.
I used to upload my artsy photos to DeviantArt, but a year ago I had enough with how slow it had become, so I set up my own small lightweight website using a simple HTML/CSS menu and galleries generated by digiKam that also uses very light jacascript for navigation.
It is blazingly fast and private enough for me.
Until its used to train AI
Not to mention it is probably getting archived by the internet archive (no hate for the internet archive I think its a great idea)
I believe google does respect robots.txt, as for other services I don’t know.
Managing digital photos is quite hard to do reliably.
Where do you store them? Optical disc, it might get mushrooms; HDD, mechanism might fail; SSD or flash, this one’s better but it might get corrupted, and so on.
Cloud services provide a convenient solution to all this, than apart from the service going down (which is less likely) have no other issues. You can also access them wherever you are.
Privacy is an important concern. It would be nice to have them encrypted on cloud. Encrypted from a local and trusted (open source) client, that is also convenient. If each time I want to show a photo to my granny I have to download and gpg a file manually, I pass.
But most people don’t care about their privacy at all anyways, so why bother.
Optical disc, it might get mushrooms
Um… what?
I think they mean
Syncthing!
Android Phone/Linux/Windows/Mac/iOS clients. Simply sync your photos to all of your devices, if you only have the one device, use a trusted friend and cross sync…
Don’t bother with cloud.
Also Signal groups for sharing with those that matter.
If you don’t care about privacy, you’re probably blasé about backup, but if you have backups it’s as simple as 3-2-1…
Just do backups, isn’t that easier than using a cloud service?
Sounds easy.
To make local backups I have to do them on schedule, transfer all photos (or rsync them) from all devices to backup media. To have some redundancy I have to make a copy (unless you got a RAID NAS at home that is). In this situation you’ll have a backup as recent as your sync frequency. To access the backups you have to browse the files on the drive, if it’s a NAS, it can be quite convenient, but not if it’s any other kind of storage.
Compare this to for example Google Photos backup. You take a photo, you have Internet connection, it’s synchronized. You don’t worry about redundancy, and can access the photo wherever you are with a very nice app.
These days I use Btrfs snapshots to do incremental backups to an external drive each week, it’s manual but it takes less than 5 minutes a week, the most I risk losing is a week of data and I trust it a lot more than relying on some external service that might go down at any time or randomly decide to delete my account. For most people just worried about photos I would assume that’s enough, I feel like anything else is just over-engineered.
For most people just worried about photos I would assume that’s enough
If it’s not fully automatic I won’t stick with it
I find keeping a calendar is useful for remembering routine tasks.
That’s a very nice solution I will look into it. Thanks.
This is basically the method I use:
https://fedoramagazine.org/btrfs-snapshots-backup-incremental/
Encryption can brute forced
Of course it can. Go brute-force a quantum resistant algorithm with a reasonably sized encryption key and call me when you’re done.
You just got to be overly paranoid as it will serve you better long term
For those who don’t want to use “Pocket”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/parenting/2024/04/08/parenting-keeping-kids-offline/
I use ente.io can share it with like 5 family members too