I’m a Tech Reporter. Can I Still Post My Baby’s Picture Responsibly?

OTI Technologist Nat Meysenburg is quoted in an article from The Guardian, in which surveillance reporter Johana Bhuiyan struggles to balance her desire to post baby pictures online with the importance of protecting her future child’s privacy. Meysenburg—a father himself—shares with Bhuiyan the “series of kind of unhappy choices” he and his partner have made to shield their own children in a world where some degree of surveillance is pretty much unavoidable.

Thinking about my own future kid, my current threat model includes his Muslim mother who is a journalist. It’s a combination that might put me, and consequently my family, at higher risk of potential doxxing, hacking or surveillance because of my religion or what I report on. So my priorities include protecting information that might reveal our home address and the places we frequent, shielding my future son’s images from surveillance tech firms like Clearview AI, and keeping as much personal information about him off the internet for as long as possible.

What that looks like in practical terms, is of course, up to me, though it might not feel like there’s a real solution, according to Nat Meysenburg, a father of two children and a technologist at New America’s Open Technology Institute, a thinktank. “The more I look, the more it’s just a series of kind of unhappy choices,” Meysenburg said. “There are definitely things, I’ve found that we can do [to protect our children’s privacy]. But I think that there’s a certain amount of resignation that I’ve come to having that this is the reality.”

Meysenburg and his partner have operating principles that have worked so far. They don’t post pictures of their children’s faces on Facebook or Instagram. The pair also accept that they can’t always control every environment. Their kids are in a daycare that posts images of their children on Facebook. “Am I going to keep a kid out of daycare when I know they post on Facebook? The answer was, in fact, no. I was like, ‘OK, I can’t prevent this, and every daycare does this, and it was the only spot that we could find.’”

While my husband and I have yet to make decisions about childcare, a close comparison for us is that it will probably be hard to limit what other family members share about our kid on Facebook or Instagram. While Muslims are accustomed to masking their children’s faces on social media to avoid evil eye – we are professionals at cropping, unafraid to throw a flower emoji on a kid’s face – that might not be the case for my non-Muslim family members and friends.

Meysenburg also suggested using an encrypted-messaging platform, Signal, to share images with a close group of friends, rather than posting on social media. “The Signal group has at least scratched the itch of having an audience of people to give you likes and comments, which is what you really want,” he said. He’s right – that itch is the core of my Posting Disease. I want other people to coo over my future son; I can’t help it.

Even off social media, there’s the question of how and where to store the images of our kids. Meysenburg said Apple iCloud has felt secure enough for his family, given photos stored on it are encrypted and that Apple’s business model is less about monetizing user data than that of many other tech companies. Fox Cahn said he gets “very nervous” about relying on the service “since I don’t know how long their encryption promises will last if governments keep pushing back”. Apple has gone back and forth on whether to roll out photo-scanning software to iCloud, pitched as a means of detecting child sexual abuse material; the company most recently scrapped the plan after receiving pushback from privacy experts. Fox Cahn instead recommended a third party encrypted file-sharing service called Tresorit for storing photos.

Then there are baby monitors – the idea of having a camera in my child’s room that connects to some external server fills me with deep anxiety. Who else is seeing this footage? Is someone going to hack the connection? But I also really want to be able to keep an eye on my kid while he’s sleeping – maybe even send a couple of snaps of the sleeping tot to grandma and grandpa. Meysenburg’s solution was to use a camera-based baby monitor without connecting it to the internet – something that requires a technical savvy I do not have, I must admit. When his family travels, Meysenburg uses an audio-only radio monitor, which, I’m increasingly realizing, might be my best option.