When you’re preparing for your newborn, you’ve got big fish to fry: where will the baby sleep? How will you feed the baby? How do we take care of a little human being? It’s unlikely email or digital privacy is top-of-mind, and certainly you won’t be discussing these things in a Lamaze class. However, they are important topics to think about at some point, either pre-birth or shortly thereafter.
At the time of this writing, there are about 326 million people in the US, and over 1 billion people have a Gmail account. It might seem silly, but by the time your little babe is all grow’d up, mylittlebabe@gmail.com will probably be gone. So will mylittlebabe01 or mylittlebabe2017. Wouldn’t it be great if you could put a hold on that perfect name now?
Technically, per Google’s Terms of Service, a Google Account holder must be at least 13 years old (in the US):
However, there’s nothing stopping you from opening up a new Gmail account for yourself, in your kid’s name. (Yahoo looks to have a similar policy.) You just need to keep the account warm, so to speak. You can use the account to leave cute messages over the years, or send photos. And not just you, but everyone in the family can can send emails. This is a great reason to teach Grandma how to send emails. Of course, Nigerian princes and Timeshares will be sending emails also, so you need to maintain the account periodically. If you do this well, when your kid comes of age, you can hand over the account and it’ll be like opening a time capsule.
Social Media
In theory, you could run with the email account suggestion and create accounts on every social media provider you think will still be around in 15 years. Will Facebook or LinkedIn survive that long? Who knows! I’m not going to suggest creating a Facebook page for your unborn child (it feels more creepy than it does useful). No, instead, craft a mental policy for how you’ll handle social media and your baby.
If you’re on Facebook, undoubtedly most of your feed is taken up by those oh-so-adorable pictures of your friends’ kids. If you’re going to join these people, or if you’re going to allow your family to share pictures of your kids, be thoughtful in making that decision. Once your digital anonymity is deflowered, you cannot reclaim it. If you start sharing pictures of your children, you have taken that choice away from them. You give up control when you share these photos, and that might be a choice you want to reserve for your kids (when they get older).
Right to Digital Privacy?
A few years back, The New York Times discussed whether a baby has an actual Right to Privacy. Perhaps you think it’s an absurd discussion point, but whatever you decide about social sharing and digital privacy, make that decision purposefully!
Facebook (and the other platforms) do have very meticulous digital privacy settings. Let us know when you’ve figure out how to use them so that only the people who should see stuff are the ones who see it.
Of course you want your family to see all the baby photos, and you want to impress those other moms (and dads) with how awesome a parent you are. There are other ways you can get photos out into the world in a more controlled manner:
- Use a password-protected tumblr account with a photo stream.
- Use and selectively share Apple’s photo stream.
- Utilize Google’s stream in the same way. Or store photos on Google Drive (or Dropbox) and manage sharing permissions closely.
- Give your close family members a digital photo frame, and upload photos periodically.
- Or go full-crazy, and bulk buy some USB drives that you can periodically hand out at the big family events.
We started with a tumblr account, which worked great for a year. After that, we did succumb to Facebook, but we did so knowingly and purposefully!
Domain Names
A domain name is the first part of a website URL. For this post, the domain name is “craigperler.com” for example. Similar to emails, there are a finite number of domain names, and if you’re at all technical, you could consider pre-registering a domain name in your child’s name.
As more and more domains are registered, new “extensions” are released. For example, I could have registered using craigperler.co or craigperler.blog. The “.co” and “.blog” didn’t exist a few years back, and presumably in a few years from now there’ll be even more of these suffixes.
If you want to register a domain name, you can use a service like GoDaddy or BlueHost. A .com will cost $8-$15/year, but it might be a worthwhile investment. Even if you never use the domain, by parking on it you guarantee that someone else won’t be able to take advantage of it.
Toddler Tech
On the other side of the aisle is the topic of whether and how you let your child use technology. For that, I’ll refer you to this other post on the matter.
