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Reasonably Accurate 馃馃 Transcript
Morning everybody. How you doing today? In this episode of the show, we're gonna talk about the online presence of your kids. Now, I know that's a little bit of a different topic. Um But what started this idea rolling in my mind was this fantastic article by Taylor Lawrence, um that she posted for the Atlantic.
And it was essentially about kids reaching a certain age and googling themselves and finding out different results and being either shocked or thrilled and far more were shocked and surprised at what they found. Um And that's from our perspective as parents or as adults in this community.
Um That shouldn't be surprising, but I think it's taking a lot of people kind of like, oh, wait a minute. Yeah, this is an issue because in this day and age when we have kids, we start right from their um ultrasound or sonogram all the way through their childhood.
We're posting photos, we're sharing and we're doing that on social media. Now, don't get me wrong. I realize the advantages of this. It's phenomenal to be able to send out photos to all of your friends and family and say, you know, look at how the kids are growing, look at the wonderful activities they're up to, but it's more complicated than just that.
So we've seen headline after headline after headline of how Facebook is mistreating our data and selling access to us um through uh to advertisers. Um And we're a lot of other stories and I'm gonna touch on that in a, in a second.
Um but we know social media is not all positive, there's a lot of net negatives, but I think the weight of which uh we are rolling on to our kids as they reach a certain age, sort of the digital weight of like, hey, by the way, all this stuff has been decided for you.
Um That's not something we normally consider. Now as parents, we make decisions all the time for our kids well being and our, our kids safety. But I don't think many of us truly understand the weight or the implications of these digital decisions because we barely understand them about ourselves.
So here you're sharing out and maybe hopefully you're using Facebook's features to lock down those photos of your kids. But what about the community that your kids live in? So schools, sports clubs, activity clubs, all these normally have some form of social media presence or some form of online presence and they're sharing out information about your kids uh through that as well.
Now, normally you have to consent to that. Um but it's not very well understood what exactly you're consenting to. I've talked about this um in my radio column for CBC Ottawa before. Um, and I'll link to that down in the description.
Um But a good example is, you know, when people say, oh, we have a classroom blog and it's password protected. Well, first of all, all that password is shared with at least that family, all the families of the kids in that school or in that class.
So there's normally at least, um, 30 families that know that password, which makes it pretty much insecure right out of the gate. But also those passwords are notoriously easy to guess because normally they're the teacher's name or the year or the name of the class pet or something really, really simple.
So there's, you know, and it depends on the security of the system they're using to host that blog. We know a lot of teachers like Weebly, Weebly had a security incident a few months back. Uh, but then there's, uh, you know, the, the Twitter posts, the Instagram posts, the youtube post.
Now, this is one that really, this is gonna get into some really despicable stuff right now and not from me, but just calling us out. Um, there was an incident with youtube, um, this week and I'll link to it down below again with Bloomberg calling it out where they found a soft core pedal file ring.
So these, um, pedophiles, the Child Predators were looking at seemingly innocent ish videos of kids and sharing them out. But youtube's algorithm um completely uh amplifies all that activity. There was very lewd and um you know, despicable comments in the comment section um for kids doing normal sporting activities and then some videos that are crossing the line and actually explicit need to be pulled down.
But the problem is why are these videos in, in play anyway, um but it's not uncommon for gymnastics meets, cheerleading, meets sporting events to post videos of the kids um online um through youtube and then share a link around and say it's not public, it's a private video.
Here's the link, guess what? And anybody can guess those links now. Yes, there's a complex code at the end, but people write programs to scan, to look for them. Um And again, once you share that link out, there's no tracking who's viewing it.
So essentially you have to treat those as public videos. Would you be comfortable posting a video of your child's activity online? What I'm calling out here is that maybe you don't have that choice. Maybe the activity there in is doing it for you.
Now, this isn't to say, don't share stuff about your kids online. This is to say we really need as a community to have discussions um around this. I can't tell you how many events I've been to where it hasn't been explicitly called out.
I think I can count on my hand, the number of events that I've been to where they've actually said, wait a minute, heads up. Don't share any of this on social media if you record this. Um Please make sure that you just uh share it directly with the grandparents who couldn't be here or something along those lines.
But none of this is, is for sharing online um like that, but even a statement like that is really, really difficult to enforce. I think we need to be far more explicit and help parents and community members understand the implications here because not only as Taylor's article points out, are we leaving a digital legacy for our Children when they reach of age and now active digital citizens?
But there's also that downside as we're seeing from that recent youtube report is that a lot of these places we have online are toxic. We know that they're toxic for adults. Can you imagine the impact on our Children? Um This is an issue that's not going away.
It's an issue we need to discuss far more than this. Hopefully, this has opened your eyes a little bit to it. I highly recommend reading Taylor's article uh down below. Um It is definitely one of those that will step, have you step back and really start to consider your participation either as a community member or as a parent um or as a relative.
Uh You know, there's a lot of questions here not a lot of answers. Um What do you think? Let me know online at Mark NC A uh in the comments down below. And as always by email me at Mark N dot C A hope to talk to you soon and we'll see you on the next episode.
