Okay, my FB is ‘private’ and I have a picture of my 3 year old (next month!) daughter as my profile pic. I think she’s adorable and that’s why I have the pic.
That said, recently I was reading a discussion about profile pics and the consensus of the small group of people seemed to be that putting up a profile pic of your child is an unnecessary and potentially stupid thing to do.
There were points made about pedophiles and securing your child’s safety.
Needless to say this has me wondering. So what are people’s opinions?
I think it’s just pointless, and not very helpful.
If you’re trying to look up old friends and colleagues on Facebook, very often the only information available to you is a list of names and profile pics. Even if you haven’t seen the person in years, the profile pic should give you a good hint whether you have the right person. So it’s infuriating when you get three hits for a name, and two of them have pictures of babies.
Sure, you think your daughter is adorable, what parent doesn’t? So create an album called “my adorable daughter”, and then friends who you know and have accepted can choose to go in and look if they’re interested.
Keep your profile pic for folks wanting to know something about you.
I probably don’t have to mention that since most childhood sexual abuse is perpetrated by people the family knows and trusts, the danger of pedophiles from putting up a photo of your child on Facebook is negligible at worst. Just a photo and even a name won’t really do too much in terms of stalking danger. It’s when people start discussing phone numbers, addresses, and current location that I think they might want to be a little more careful.
I do agree that it’s annoying when someone puts up a non-identifiable profile pic, but I really can’t complain too much since, as someone who had a baby panda as her Facebook profile picture for months, it would make me a hypocrite.
Hm…I get that - however some people don’t want other people to find them on FB. I think that there are privacy settings that make you non searchable. I think I’ve enabled them for my account (I’m not quite sure).
I’ll take 1, along with 3, it’s an overly cutesy idea, on a par with proclaiming yourself to be Suzie’s Mom or Jimmy’s Dad. Yes, if you’re a parent, BEING a parent is part of who you are…but the only people who are really going to be looking you up by your kid’s pic are the parents of his/her playmates and classmates.
I think that the risk to a child’s safety in these circumstances is minimal.
Tiny eye (a firefox plugin and poss. standalone app) can find other occurrences of the the same pic elsewhere on the web - like say, your child’s school’s web site, summer camp, dance studio, etc, etc. So yeah, definitely not the brightest choice.
Unless you really “haven’t aged a bit” since graduation, just use your yearbook photo or one from around the same time.
It does creep me out a bit in a different way – that picture is supposed to represent YOU. Not something you like, you. Don’t YOU have some identity of your own you’d like to share with the world?
No, not a parent. But my friends with kids think the practice of posting your child’s picture as your own is kind of abhorrent. I would say, on average, they have stronger feelings about it than me. Perhaps its the crowd I run with. shrug
Note that I don’t see anything strange about posting a picture that includes both you and your child. that says “hey I’m a parent!” rather than “my only identity takes the form of a toddler.”
It used to irritate me a bit, but that’s no longer true. The fact is that most people on FB change their pictures around every so often. Right now mine is a graphic that’s a joke on my profession. Sometimes it’s one that says “Educational Anarchist,” or a straightforward photo of me, or I’ve been known to put up a wedding pic or one of me as a baby. And on my kid’s birthday, I had a really cute picture of her, so I put it up for a day or two. A lot of people seem to do pretty much the same thing, and I fail to see how that negates my identity as an individual. (And my name is so unusual that no one is going to fail to find me based on my photo.)
I’m not worried at all about predators seeing a tiny photo on FB and stalking my kid from it. If the predator in question is my ‘friend,’ my kids are already known. If not, then it’s not going to be quite so easy to track us down and kidnap that one particular kid. There are about a billion more likely scenarios.
My daughter is in my profile pic, as a new infant. I chose that pic because it’s the most useful to old friends who are trying to find me. Most pics of me now are compeltely unrecognizable from who I was then, but that one does vaguely resemble the highschool me.
I suppose I could crop her out of it, but then folks would wonder why I’m smiling at the floor. . .
I think it’s dangerous to have child pics on a dating site, as there are people who will date you just to get close to your children. That’s not how I use Facebook though, and I would never start a relationship with someone who just randomly contacted me through there.
Yeah, I think the idea that a pedophile is going to see your kid’s photo on facebook and become obsessed enough to track him/her down is pretty far-fetched. It makes a great story for a TV show, but in reality your kid is way more likely to get molested by someone you already know, be it a neighbor, teacher, etc. Then there are the hundreds of potential pedophiles we regularly encounter every time we take our daughter out in public who could much more easily follow us home.
I’m not necessarily bothered by that, per say, but by the fact that if you can track that, then you could find out a whole lot more information. Potentially, anyway.
Maybe I’ve been spending too much time on 4chan, but people’s stuff gets hacked all the time by seemingly unimportant data that Anonymous has gathered.
That’s why you should always put a bag over your kid’s head when you go out in public, so pedophiles don’t know if your kid is ugly or not. It’s just common sense.
Meatros your usernames makes me think you’re a guy, so I only find it a little bit weird that you’d use your daughter’s photo, and only because a lot of people use their own childhood pics for their profiles. So seeing a female kid when I’m looking for a guy would be a little odd to me.
Granted for me in any childhood pics of me I’d be wearing thick 1970s collar and monster plaid, so there’d be no mistaking a new photo of a currently young kid from an old one of me, but I’d just thought I’d point that out.
Well, I am a parent, and I agree with Hello Again. I find it a little weird when people use pictures of their kids as their profile pictures. I mean, it’s sort of understandable if you have a newborn, or if you have a picture of your kid doing something particularly hilarious, I suppose, but in general I feel that your profile pic is supposed to be expressive of you, not of your kids.
That’s only a minor thing, though. What really bugs me is not being able to identify people from their profile pictures, as other people have already mentioned. That’s just annoying.
I would not in the slightest bit be concerned about compromising my child’s safety by putting their photo up in my profile, though.