Dec
2
Hey, thanks for your supportive comments re: Pervy Flickr Freak. A few hours after I posted the entry and also reported the account to Flickr, the guy’s account was listed as no longer active. I’m not sure why, if it’s because Flickr took action or what, but hooray.
I’ve been thinking about this little incident, not that it was some big nasty traumatic event but just thinking about the bigger picture of my family’s information and photos being available to anyone, regardless of their interest. The entire subject of privacy on the internet is a slippery continuum of choices, and I don’t think there are really any hard and fast rules that apply to everyone. Some people use a complicated pseudonym system that requires its own Cast of Characters explanation page on their blogs and never post personal photos, some people use their full names and their kids are more recognizable than Suri Cruise.
Where common sense and paranoia overlap is different for everyone, I think. I tend to take the approach of accepted risk, in that I accept there’s a chance something ooky will happen as a result of my blog in the same sense I accept there’s a chance that I will get in an accident while driving Riley to the playground. Which is to say I believe it’s unlikely that it will happen, and the reward outweighs the choice of refusing to leave the house.
We live in a world that offers an infinite selection of things to freak out about when it comes to the safety and well-being of our kids, and it’s hard not to spend all your time as a parent dwelling on the various horrible possibilities. My goal there is to find an area of reasonable precaution and awareness, and stop myself from spiraling into pointless anxiety—because otherwise it’s never a cough, it’s always meningitis. You know? It’s not a bruise, it’s leukemia; it’s not a tantrum, it’s a major emotional disorder; it’s not a creepo on Flickr, it’s someone parked outside my house furiously jerking his meat while waiting to snatch my kids, because he saw them on the internet and the temptation was just too great.
Moderation in all things, I guess. Although maybe a No Naked Heinies Policy isn’t such a bad idea.
In other news, it snowed this weekend and transformed everything into a magical wonderland of beauty and peppermint white mochas.
Sadly, it all turned to rain this morning—I am currently ignoring Dog’s piteous whines at the back door, because she appears to have found a puddle of muddy slush and is now cleverly disguised as a Brown Dog—but not before we went out and got our Christmas tree in the snow:
Note how the safety-conscious parents have completely forgotten to outfit the child with gloves. SCORE.
Nov
30
Every now and then I notice some Odd Activity on my Flickr account. There’s a page where you can see activity over the last X amount of time, including comments on photos, notes, and who may have add what photo as a favorite. It’s the last function that sometimes reveals weird results, like when a photo gets favorited that I posted months and months ago. If it’s a photo of, say, the moon, or a flower or whatever, I don’t think twice about it, but every now and then the photo is something just sort of—well, the other day someone favorited a photo of me wearing knitted slippers. No big deal, except it seemed a little odd, and when I looked at the person’s account they had no photos of their own (FLAG), their name was something like pxy205m (FLAG FLAG), and when I looked at their favorites page, every single photo was of a woman wearing knitted slippers (FLAG FLAG FLAG WTF).
I guess in that instance someone could have been collecting inspirational photos for their big slipper-knitting project of 2007, or something. There have been others, though, where the circumstances are the same—weird user name, no photos of their own—and the photos they’ve collected are all clearly fetishy in some way. Feet, for instance. Or boobies. Not that I post pictures of my boobs on Flickr, but you know, sometimes they are just Present and Accounted For.
This kind of stuff mostly makes me shrug—whatever gets your rocks off, you know? If slippers are your thing, fine. Have at it. But. BUT. This morning I found that someone had favorited an old photo of Riley, one I’d taken during the summer where he’s viewed from the back playing with a hula hoop. He’s also naked, with his little butt completely visible.
I took a look at this person’s account (no photos of their own, natch) and here are the photos they’ve collected. All little kids, all in various stages of undress. Little boys, specifically. I might have been convinced that this person just liked colorful candid native kid-focused scenery if he hadn’t added my son’s blindingly white suburban butt to the page.
I don’t know how this person found the photo of Riley because I don’t tend to tag things, I certainly wouldn’t have added some descriptors like “NAKED HEINIE” or “PED0PHILES WELCOME”. Maybe they just stumbled across it, maybe they spent a lot of time going through my son’s photos looking for a naked one.
Either way: fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Someone slobbering over my feet? No big deal. Someone slobbering over my son? VERY. BIG. DEAL.
I deleted the photo, but the whole thing has given me the heebs. I mean, one thing I can do is never post a picture of him unless he’s fully dressed—how sad is that, that innocent pictures of babies should be censored? I could limit photo viewing to friends and family. I could stop posting any kid photos on Flickr and just use that site for documenting my thrilling fashion choices. Which would be so, so lame. I love looking at family photos from the people I follow on Flickr, and I love sharing pictures of my own family.
I suppose I’ve been kind of naive, assuming everyone that looks at the snippets from our lives is doing so with good intentions. Or if not good intentions, at least not sweaty, creepy intentions.
-
My product review site:
[