This is my daughter
This is my daughter. And this may be the only picture I’ve ever knowingly shared of her. My wife and I are those people who don’t believe in putting our children online for our dopamine hit and the worlds amusement. You won’t find a visual past history of them when you search for them in the future. It doesn’t exist. As parents it never seemed the smart thing to do. Birthdays, holidays and other celebrations through the years won’t find photos of my family. There are plenty of photos of me and my wife, as we are adults and use SM as a promotional platform to make money, period. We are not selling vacuous ideas or products but products created by our genius and creativity. We see plenty of empty ideas and products online, we all do, it is plentiful and free to look at. Just about anything can and will be sold, even if it is not today it will be soon. This includes data, your data. All these free platforms, FB, Google, etc, if they are free then YOU are the product. I think everyone gets this at this point in time and most of us are okay with this arrangement. I know I am.
Everything we upload is forever there, even if you believe it to be deleted. There is an archive of the internet that you will never be privy to and it sits on the servers of these corporations that give us free shit. They believe it to be fair use. They have tried many times over the years to publicly state that they own it if you upload it – Instagram, Google, Facebook and other less known platforms have all tried it, even Adobe (actually Adobe is one of the most shit stain corps I’ve ever given my money too) recently claimed your work is now free use for their AI models. The push back was instant and effective. Each company pulled back on these ideas of outright stealing our intellectual property for their profit and gain. When they get slapped with this push back they always say “It was a clerical error in the release statement by an intern and was not meant to go out”. That is actually what Adobe said and similar claims of innocents have been made by the other corps as a reaction to public outrage. So when they tell you that your data has been deleted, as per your request, do you believe them? I fucking don’t. It is just stored for sometime in the future when things get easier for them. And it seems that is the direction we are heading at now.
Trust is something to me that must be earned. It is something my father said to me when I was a young boy. Still not sure how true I believe it to be but I know it never felt once like a bad idea. So I guess it’s a good one. In my view anything that puts profits before the welfare of the people can never be truly trusted. It’s just not in their interest. Period.
Do I care if they use my randomized data to sell to advertisers. Not one wit. It is a free platform after all. But I’ll be damned if they are going to profit in any way from my children. Without their consent!
There are children who will soon be adults who will come to the realization that their parents have created a public record of the their lives online since the moment they were born. And they will really have no idea how much or how to access it when the time comes.
That to me is shortsighted and vain. It is using your children for a quick hit of pleasure.
I was going to write something about how my daughter is fearless in nature about how see would pickup and exam fistfuls of worms (I have the photos but you’ve never seen them), how she can dive to 5 meters, how she runs and twirls in the sand ( you won’t find these online either) and all the amazing times raising this incredible person. But just the idea of sharing her started to get the alarm bells ringing. What I ended up with is this writing about data, children and trust.
Anyway, this photo was taken is Portugal on the Atlantic coast, and being her, decided it would be a good idea to play in the thick seaweed. It was a beach full of people and no one was in the water here due to the seaweed. People were smiling, some were aghast at her boldness and performance. I was proud. That’s my girl. My girl. Not yours. Not the internets. There is no record of her life stored on some corporate basement server waiting for the day she can become profitable. Fuck that.
