Hi, my wife decided to create a new email for our newborn daughter which my wife would use to send updates to our relatives about what is going on in our daughter life. My wife is using gmail, I do use proton. She has created a new gmail account but I have asked her to reconsider and to create a new account on proton privacy wise. What arguments would you use for my case? Thanks.
You must log in or register to comment.
The offline photos idea would be a wise choice until the child has grown up and can make the decision but let us assume your wife will not accept that approach.
The Proton Drive idea also sounds reasonable since you already use that service. You should password protect the shared link but you will want another communication path than email to share the password to your shared folder. Use different folders with limited expiration dates (3 months?) for different sets of photos. Be sure to write to relatives that they are not to share the photos. We get emails asking us not to share things, be it links to photos or sensitive topics such as health. If someone breaks the rule, you may have to “ground” that person by cutting off their access to folder sharing for a period of time. You must communicate the “grounding” to others but that person might still go behind your back and get the link and password from a sympathetic someone else.
Have you thought about using a Fediverse instance for family and friends? There is a fantastic blog post on this subject. https://runyourown.social/ You would end up running a fork like Hometown that allows you to keep a portion of your community not federated where family and friends can share pictures with each other so that only users with accounts (plus your web server staff) can access your photos. https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown You would be helping out many family members and friends instead of only helping your child. You would get more family and friends to support you because they would also be invested in making your Hometown server work for them. Find a relatively safe web server to host your data. https://www.eucloud.tech/en/eu-providers/vps-hosting
Wait until she’s old enough to decide for herself. I would be really jacked off to find my parents had put my life online from the minute I was born.
And Google of all the ones she could have chosen? Your wife needs to have a good talk with herself.
Have you considered putting letters written on paper in the post?
Seems unwise to give your child’s early life story to any of these companies, especially when mapped to a network of her relatives and likely including photographs which people may not be as diligent to keep private as you.
Your daughter cannot consent to this, and it is your duty as parents to protect her privacy until she is old enough to decide for herself what to share and where.
I would just tell her that you should really not ever “create an account for your newborn child” who may not want their whole childhood documented on the internet forever later on in their life.
For all you know they may not turn out to keep being your daughter forever. It’s kind of a gross overstepping of parental boundaries and something that should be left for them to decide.
This doesn’t mean you can’t keep records in case they want them in the future but as someone that grew up well before all this social media stuff it sort of terrifies me regarding the privacy and agency of younger generations.
Makes me glad I have always been extremely averse to having any sort of photos of me or any of my personal information anywhere online that I did not post till well into my 30s.
Do with this information what you will but I had that boundary crossed just with photos and such shared around way before I had any way to consent to it and some aspects still make me feel violated to this day and there is nothing I can do about it.
Google looks. Google reports. Even if you did nothing wrong you’re guilty until you prove innocent and even then you’ll never get your account back.
A newborn doesn’t need an email address
Id have been so pissed if my parents had destroyed any hope of privacy before i could tell them how fucked up that is. Your child didnt consent to letting google read about its life and see its pictures.
Whats her issue with using proton? It has all the features of google plus your setting ur kid up with a private ecosystem that will make them one of the very few who may have any hope of digital privacy in the future.
Could also just show her this comment chain where she can learn from us armchair experts.
to the same note, you shouldn’t upload images of them anywhere. not facebook, not google (drive or any other service), not facebook messenger, but not even anywhere encrypted.
take the images with a regular camera, or a phone that does not give any apps storage access permissions, and have physical prints, which can be viewed every time they visit you. you will need to tell them they can’t take photos of the children nor the photo album. this has worked well forag es, they shouldn’t be so entitled to images.
if I were you, I would require all guests to leave all their phones on a shelf near the main door. It’ll not only prevent photos, but also increase quality time by them not scrolling facebook and such while there.
before you tell them this, let them know firmly that you’re not doing this for one, but for child safety and basic human rights, and that in your house it’s you who make the rules. and keep in mind, that even when you are the guest, you hold the rights to disallow making pictures of your children until they are old enough to make the decision fur themselves.why don’t use even the private cloud services?
the reason is your relatives who you trusted, will probably download the videos, and reshare them with others through the services you wanted to avoid. also consider that most of them doesn’t have any information hygiene, they won’t even know they are doing something bad, they won’t understand and will hand-wave all your concerns away.
this is not just a technical problem, but also a people problem, which cannot be solved with tech.if your wife does not cooperate, you won’t be able to protect your children to the level you want. of course don’t divorce over that or something, it’s not worth it, you can probably still do lots. maybe over time, going slower and you can be forming your family’s privacy habits.
but I also have to mention, I wouldn’t want to live with someone who is not intereinterested in any level about personal privacy. if you have got so far that you’re having kids, this is probably not the case for you.as last words, don’t take this as a strong “don’t take any pictures” stance. yes, do take pictures, they’ll be very good to have later, but make sure that you can keep control over them, for your children’s safety.
and don’t get (too) mad if parents in the class will take group pictures on which they are there. that’s something else, and hopefully relatively rare. best you can do with that is teach your children about why they might not want it, the reasons you don’t want it to be uploaded to facebook and such, and that they agree on this they can request the parents to be more careful.
“arguments” alone don’t suffice.
a demonstration of how easy it is to use proton drive (to share videos and millions of photos she’s going to dump on relatives who are barely interested in seeing another baby photo) and protonMail would be more convincing.
Privacy interfaces have evolved to be attractive to lambda users.
when it comes to your wife uploading your daughters photographs to google servers, she can’t decide alone: you share the authority (but would this argument matter in a marriage? No?
would having a protonMail matter if the photographs are attachments and recipients have gmail? No.
good luck. Not an easy task
Your daughter’s Google account can be closed without appeal. All the memories gone. This less likely to happen using Proton or Tuta.
