Facebook and our kids

I've been doing a lot of thinking, and I'm beginning to wonder if I should be posting photos, status updates, notes, and videos of my children on Facebook. If it is posted on Facebook it is an online footprint of their existence and they don't even get a say in it. All their milestones, photos (although I don't post anything that would be inappropriate or that I think they would ever be embarrassed about), accomplishments...it just seems like although I want to share with family and [close] friends, all these things really are private and belong to them. 20 years ago when I was 3 years old all of these things were only shared among family and friends through letters with photos included or phone calls. There was no e-mail, no Facebook, no social networks, no internet. My childhood is documented with pictures, the odd video, and by stories told by my family, also a journal my mom kept for me. But the rest is by memory. My children could have every minute of their lives documented if I so chose to do that....which is a little bit scary. Especially when it can be exposed to the whole world. Facebook owns every single thing that is posted on their site. This information will be available to anyone who wants and will pay for it. By putting our full names on social networks such as Facebook we are exposing everything that is available there. Some of it can even be out of our control! If someone posts pictures of you without your consent that photo belongs to facebook, and all it needs is an "unofficial" tag (i.e. you "untag" yourself but they can still "tag" you without linking it to your personal facebook page), that picture is property of Facebook and can be viewed with an association to you. Scary stuff. But mostly, I don't want to be putting my children out there without them having any say in how they could possibly be viewed later in life. It can seem so private when you change your privacy settings, but really this is just a false sense of security. This stuff can come back to haunt anyone, at any point in their lives. If social networking has become this big already, imagine what it will be when our children are grown, even the children that haven't even been born, let alone thought of, could have access to everything you are putting on Facebook today. I don't want to be over the top in either direction...but these are things to think about.

Society is evolving at a fast pace, and in an unknown direction. Are we ready to face what implications this might have on us and our children in the future? I'm questioning how easily I put things online. It is a tough decision for me to take my kids off Facebook for a couple of reasons. The first being that I use the photo albums as a way to store photos in an organized fashion so that friends and family can view them. If anything were ever to happen to my computer, the printed photos, or our external hard drive, I would have copies on Facebook. I know there are other options for this, but so far this is the easiest way and it is also a great tool to provide updates both in photo form, milestones, stories, etc. It works, other than the fact that all of this information belongs to Facebook. I have another blog (jackandjuju.blogspot.com) that is all about my kids and our life, but I have already decided to make that private. I'm looking into the best way to achieve that, hopefully there is a server somewhere that allows for a simple password to be entered rather than to have to "sign in" and be invited to the blog. I'll keep the followers of Jack and Juju posted.

This is big stuff, and we all need to be thinking about it. Everything is permanent now, everything online that is. At what point are we going too far, and at what point are we just going with the flow of society? We don't want to shelter our children too much, but we don't want to throw them into the madness either.

What are all of your thoughts on Facebook and your kids (or future kids)?