Rory Cellan-Jones blogs:
Think you have got your online privacy sorted? Perhaps you’ve made sure that your Facebook settings are super-secure, and that only close friends and family can see the photographs you post on the web. Well, just be thankful you are not a baby, because the biggest threat to your online privacy could come from your parents.
If you are born in 2010, then by the time you are two, your parents are likely to have posted pictures of you on the internet, sometimes even before you are born, and some will even have gone so far as to create a Facebook profile for you.
[…]
I am slightly less comfortable with the idea of creating a profile for your child online without their consent. A friend made a Facebook page for his newborn son within days of the boy’s birth. Now, at 18 months, the young fellow already has 132 friends (including me) and is frequently online, posting photos of himself and telling us about his passion for red buses and police cars, and his sleepovers with other babies. I am not entirely sure, though, that it is his fingers on the keyboard.
This is an engaging way for his parents to let their nearest and dearest know of their son’s progress, and they can control who sees any of the material. Just a bit of fun, really. The question is what will the infant Facebooker feel when he gets to an age when he’s actually allowed to have a social networking profile? He will find that his entire life up to that point has already been laid out online.
Read more on BBC.
Via @ActNowTraining