The online baby

Remember those baby albums you have stuck somewhere down the back of a closet, where you're running naked, or sitting on the potty for the first time, or eating spaghetti in your high chair with it falling all over your head?

No doubt your parents have done what all Kiwi parents seem to love doing and displayed a lovingly hand-picked selection at your 21st party.

I was horrified to see, at my 21st, my mother's adoringly assembled montage of photos, including several from my fat, spotty, frizzy-haired (at that stage all-too-recent) adolescence.

"But I loved the way you were then," she said as I hysterically wailed in protest.

These days, parents hardly wait until a child's 21st any more. In fact, according to research out from AVG Technologies (a security software firm based in Oz), 91 per cent of Kiwi children have "some kind of digital dossier or footprint" on the internet by the time they are two years old.

By that, the research means that 91 per cent of Kiwi mothers with children under the age of two have uploaded images of their kids - whether that means a full moving montage with pictures on a custom-built website (a first child thing surely!) - or a picture on Facebook to let everyone know your child continues to have the requisite number of body parts.

A further third of all mothers had uploaded images of their newborns, and 23 per cent had uploaded antenatal scans online.

(I know people are in love with antenatal scans but really, what kind of information can they impart except that a child has its extremities? And even then, the information can be confusing. My sister sent me her child's scan, which seemed to indicate she was incubating a child with a leg coming out of its forehead. As you'd hope, this was an inaccurate reading of the situation!)

To my mind, the worry isn't particularly that a wide audience might be able to see pictures of your child. Despite the constant warnings about internet predators and paedophiles lurking, it seems to me that keeping tabs on your child's physical and emotional health in real life might counter internet "stranger danger" - at least as well as any other danger your child is going to face.

The real danger is that your child will eventually hate you sharing every intimate detail of their lives online.

As AVG says, you're "creating a digital history for a human being that will follow him or her around for the rest of [his or her] life".

Those warnings dovetail nicely with recent warnings about information posted to social networking sites like Facebook - information such as drunken escapades, sexy shennanigans and other activities that might lower someone in the estimation of future employers.

Is it possible that information you post about your life - information that is out there for all time - will prove embarrassing for your future children?

I realise that "Mommy bloggers" must possibly be the worst offenders in the "creating a lifelong digital footprint" and "causing future embarrassment" stakes. All I can say in my own defence is that I hope I have pointed out my own failings more than my children's quirks, and that the kids can look back and say "bloody hell my mother was a nut" rather than "how could she have posted a picture of me doing that naked fairy dance!"

I think I'll save that one for the 21st.

* Almost a quarter (23 per cent) of children begin their digital lives when their parents upload their antenatal scans to the internet.

Fuente: NZ Herald

Kiwi toddlers have big online footprint

New Zealand families are at the forefront of the international trend to upload prenatal ultrasound images, tweet pregnancy experiences, make online photo albums of children from birth, and even create email addresses for babies, international internet security company AVG says.

Parents in New Zealand are increasingly building digital footprints for their children before birth and from the moment they are born, according to a survey the company carried out in New Zealand, the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

The survey found that overall, 81 per cent of children under the age of two had some kind of digital profile or footprint, with images of them posted online.

In the US, 92 per cent of children have an online presence by the time they are two, with NZ toddlers hard on their heels at 91 per cent. Canada and Australia, at 84 per cent, lead the other nations, which averaged 73 per cent in Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Spain. Japan lagged on 43 per cent.

According to the research, the average digital birth of children happened at about six months, with 41 per cent of New Zealand and Australian children having photos and information posted online within weeks of being born. The next highest proportion of newborns with an online life from birth were in Britain and Canada (37 per cent each).

Almost a quarter (23 per cent) of children begin their digital lives when parents upload their prenatal scans to the internet, but the practice was more common in New Zealand (30 per cent), the US (34 per cent) and Canada (37 per cent). On average, this happened with only 14 per cent of parents in France, Italy, Germany and Japan.

Overall, 7 per cent of babies and toddlers have an email address created for them by their parents, and 5 per cent have a social network profile, but in New Zealand the figures were 4 per cent and 6 per cent respectively.

When asked what motivates parents to post images of their babies on the internet, more than 70 per cent of all mothers surveyed said it was to share with friends and family, but 22 per cent of mothers in the US said they wanted to add more content to their own social network profiles.

The AVG survey also found mothers were moderately concerned about the amount of online information that would be available on their children in future years, with Spanish mothers the most concerned and Canadian mothers the least worried.

AVG, in a statement, urged parents to be aware of the privacy settings they had set on their social networks and other profiles.

The research was conducted by Research Now among 2200 mothers with toddlers during September.

Fuente: NZ Herald