At every milestone in life—when we get married or give birth or become ill or renovate or go to school or make career moves—we go online to get advice, to commiserate and to celebrate.ⁱ But when it comes to family pictures and stories, increasingly we hesitate, wanting to share but fearful of lurking badness, of those uncontrolled elements.ⁱⁱ

In real life there’s a time for both public and private gatherings, and ways to do both with hospitality as well as street smarts.

High-profile privacy breaches at popular social networking sites naturally make us nervous. How much should we worry? How can we feel safe and in control while we take advantage of the web’s great power to connect people?^{iii iv}

Well-meaning voices insist The only way to keep your children safe is to never post pictures online! and inspire more fear, uncertainty and doubt than good sense. Without living off the grid in a woodland cabin—which is what you’d need to do to escape the pervasiveness of the web—is the ideal of privacy in the Internet age a hopeless oxymoron?

To suggest the Internet is inherently unsafe is like banning hugs for fear of spreading disease—it’s a near-tragic overstatement. If you don’t know how to protect yourself, it’s hard to ever feel safe in life, even when danger is remote. And this kind of blanket condemnation would have us be less joyful and less connected when safety, utility, and sensibility are well within reach.

the web is just a technology. it’s how we use it that matters

On its own, the Internet is like the four wheels of a car. While it makes sharing ‘go’, it’s merely a transport protocol. Applications built on top of it are as diverse as every vehicle that exists—gigantic and utilitarian, or compact and luxurious. Just as I wouldn’t transport my kid’s soccer team to the park in a Ferrari, I’m not likely to have a satisfactory result publishing private content through an application designed around the idea of maximum openness.

understanding and achieving online privacy

Every person is private sometimes and public sometimes. In the rush to celebrate the new commons we've created, we've not yet figured out how to integrate our private selves into this new, networked universe. So we fumble along, doing our best to either use public social networking sites in a private way, or pull information from our private spaces into our public channels.

Facebook for instance, a site I use and love, can be used privately by unplugging yourself from the public-sharing defaults—a choice that the big sites are attempting to accommodate more smoothly driven by sheer demand. Recently, Facebook has put more of its plumbing at our disposal with a somewhat complicated and unpredictable set of switches and sliders—but for them, privacy is an afterthought and not by original design. The counter-intuitiveness of this approach often makes it difficult for average people to cover all the bases.

Another option is to completely segregate your private and public online spaces. This way, you keep private content from accidentally spilling over into public channels—however, we’re not all binary. In our lives there are all kinds of relationships that aren’t so easy to categorize, such as colleagues who enjoy seeing the latest pictures of your kids. Segregation can be good, but it implies an absolute distinction that, in reality, is more nuanced.

The degree of privacy in your online life can align perfectly to what’s most important to you. By simply being educated about the mechanics, pros and cons of one approach versus the other, you’ll be able to share more confidently in this exciting new realm.

privacy in public spaces

The Facebooks and MySpaces and Flickrs of the world exist to connect everyone to everyone. Their business models rely on generating traffic, and on the selling of data and advertising. In these universes, the more photos and profiles that are public and tagged, the better—that’s how they get paid. Just as a racecar is no minivan, a site that’s primarily for socializing with the public at large is not likely to be the best option for sharing in a private setting.

Do a little research before you commit to a new service. Look through the terms and conditions (especially those regarding licensing and redistribution of content), and find out who is behind it. If you can’t find out much information about the company and its motives, you should wonder—why won’t they share information with you while asking you for yours?

Finally, if you’re active on any public sites, get familiar with the settings, defaults and options within your account and profile. Drill down until you understand how to limit and safeguard your information and your images.

Regardless of whether or not you choose to share photos of your kids on MySpace, Flickr or Facebook, it would be wise to revisit your privacy settings on these sites. Here’s what to watch for.

MySpace: Login and go to Account Settings > Privacy Settings. Under ‘Who Can See My Profile’, select ‘My Friends Only’. Then, extend this to every possible setting—for instance, allow only your friends to see your full birthday and blog comments. Make it so that friend requests require either a last name or email, choose ‘no bands’ for your friend requests and block users under the age of 18 from contacting you.

A public environment that has added privacy options to varying degrees of success, be aware that MySpace is still the target of hacks and privacy breaks.

Flickr: Login and go to My Account > Privacy and Permissions. You’ll see an extensive list of tweaks—in every case, choose to hide yourself, giving access to ‘Only You’ wherever possible. Most importantly, under ‘Defaults for New Uploads’, allow only friends and family to see your photostream, and under ‘Global Settings’, choose to hide your photos from public searches both via flickr.com and on 3rd-party sites.

If you’re not quite ready to restrict your entire photostream, you can choose to make only some images private. Avoiding the use of tags will make your photos less ‘findable’, as is avoiding participation in groups that others can browse by interest (i.e. child portrait photography). This may or may not be something you want for your photos in general.

Facebook: In the top right of your screen you’ll see a link for the Privacy settings page. Here is where you can control who sees your profile and personal information—set ‘only friends’ all the way down the list. Under Privacy > Search, you can choose to be unfindable by anyone but friends. Since there are so many public defaults to sift through, removing yourself from any networks greatly improves your privacy (do this through Accounts > Networks).

The more information you provide, the more applications you accept and the more you choose to reveal about your activity in your feeds (turn off all feed notifications via Privacy > News Feed and Mini Feed), the less private you’ll be on Facebook.

another option: separate parks, separate personas

Aside from unplugging from the public defaults on large sharing sites, you can also be private online by keeping your social and your private personas segregated on different sites—one as the public park, and one as the fenced backyard. There are a number of sites that host truly private spaces, and this is usually the best way to keep your private information from spilling over into the public realm.

Although keeping what’s public and private separate is the simplest and most effective approach, it’s not without its drawbacks—namely the inconvenience of managing two separate and parallel accounts. Compounding this is the grey area between family and friends, colleagues and acquaintances. I may want my sister to know how my career is going, or an office mate to know that my brother is getting married. With two online personas I’d need to upload twice, switch contexts, learn a new set of tools, send a second set of invites—and the people who want to follow along would need to sign up for a new site, monitor yet another inbox, watch their spam folder for alert messages from a new service. We call this signup fatigue, the barrage of invites to different sites and services, all of whom want me to create profiles and describe myself in detail for them—and it’s a real barrier to welcoming loved ones into the stories of your family’s life.

in your backyard: private by design

In designing an invite-only corner of the internet for families, our Kinzin mantra was to make privacy the lowest common denominator—and to make the smallest, most intimate, most tightly controlled networks the easiest to achieve. We also designed the system to be convenient for you, the publisher, and for your audience—who don’t want to jump through a bunch of hoops just to see your photos. Make it as easy as possible to share and participate—that was our goal.

Our unique approach was to make Kinzin a virtual fenced-in yard, but one that you can integrate into whichever online environment you already use. You can be in Facebook among your main feeds, messages and contact lists, but have purpose-built privacy at your disposal. People you invite add this private channel to the tools they already use to communicate: Facebook or another site, email, or even postal mail.

From the first Kinzin login, privacy is the default. There’s no need for parents to reverse-engineer defaulted public access of a hundred different flavors. This is because rather than attempting to be all things to all people—which is often the cause of design and implementation flawsi—we purpose-built Kinzin for families, and in particular for parents who wish to share information about their kids with their loved ones.

What this means for you is that everything in Kinzin is private, all the time, even if you don’t want to be private all the time. What it means for your loved ones is that your trust in them is the key to get in, and technology is not a barrier.

All Together Now.

for further consideration: about kinzin

To make Kinzin happen, I gathered a team of people with the same personal priorities—to take this revolutionary communications technology and use it to make welcoming, joyful and safe spaces for families like ours.

make your space invisible to the outside world

Unlike other social networking tools and online communities, Kinzin gives you complete control of who views your personal images and words. Only those people you’ve invited can view photos and stories. Nothing within a kidstream can be forwarded—nor can the ability to access them.

With Kinzin, create your own social network, inviting exactly who you want to participate—and stay completely under the radar of everybody else.

extend kinzin kidstreams to any channel

It’s like that album tucked away on your bookshelf—except it's also on your grandmother’s, your uncle’s and your sister’s bookshelves too, growing magically on its own. Make kidstreams accessible via the web, email, Facebook and even postal mail.

share via your invite-only ‘walled garden’ on facebook

In addition to being a standalone service, Kinzin runs on top of Facebook. Install Kinzin within your Facebook profile for a completely private stream where you can upload news, stories and pictures that flow through to your loved ones (as you choose) automatically.

delight everyone, even offline—easy printing, free shipping

Not everyone is on Facebook, and not everyone is on the Internet. In addition to allowing loved ones to choose whichever technology platform they prefer, Kinzin will print and ship a package of photos from your kidstream to Granny and Grampa (and anyone else who likes to get physical prints) for you.

share pictures, stories, anecdotes

Kinzin kidstreams are easy to navigate and fun to comment on, combining photos with words to give loved ones a much richer view of your child’s life.

i The Internet’s Growing Role in Life’s Major Moments
“For many online Americans, the internet has become a crucial source of information at major moments and milestones in their lives. Our surveys show that 45% of internet users, or about 60 million Americans, say that the internet helped them make big decisions or negotiate their way through major episodes in their lives in the previous two years.”
—PEW Internet & American Life Project, April 19, 2006

ii Pictures of children online
“…As a parent, and also as someone who has the opportunity to talk to young people in the context of work about there own web practices and strategies for a great and safe experience of tech, the implications and impacts of posting children’s pictures publicly is something I’ve had to think about.”
—SocialTech (Josie Fraser), February 03, 2007

iii MySpace Bug Leaks 'Private' Teen Photos to Voyeurs
“…A backdoor in MySpace's architecture allows anyone who's interested to see the photographs of some users with private profiles—including those under 16—despite assurances from MySpace that those pictures can only be seen by people on a user's friends list.”
—Wired Magazine, Kevin Poulsen, January 17, 2008

iv SmugMug’s Private Pics Are Public
“Smugmug’s users deserve to know their private photos aren’t private, and as soon as possible...”
—Google Blogoscoped, January 28, 2008

v A decade of adoption: How the internet has woven itself into American life
“A decade after browsers came into popular use, the Internet has reached into—and, in some cases, reshaped—just about every important realm of modern life. It has changed the way we inform ourselves, amuse ourselves, care for ourselves, educate ourselves, work, shop, bank, pray and stay in touch. The Web has become the “new normal” in the American way of life; those who don’t go online constitute an ever-shrinking minority.”
—PEW Internet & American Life Project, January 25, 2005

vi Arguments against general-purpose interfaces: The case for specialization
“…We argue for specialization, for the development of specific, stand-alone applications, each with its own physical shape and mechanical components tailored for the needs of that application…”
—James R. Miller, Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation & Donald A. Norman, University of California, San Diego, August, 1986.