Paranoid Parent Syndrome - to post pictures off offspring?

philthejuggler wrote in post #5471203
Does anyone perceive any danger of posting pictures of their kids here, or am I being super-paranoid?

Yes, but I'm a cop, and I've seen the evil people can do to children.

jd40 wrote in post #5531217
On the side note, it's funny how it's perfectly fine for people to whip out their camera phone and P&S to snap away pictures, but there's that negative vibe when you pull out your DSLR to take quality picture of your kids

Twice this week I was approached and told I couldn't take pictures. I had in my hands a 5D with an "L" mounted.

The first occasion I was waiting on the sidewalk to pick up my grandson from school (preK), shooting closeups of a brick wall and a chain link fence. A teacher sternly asked my "why I had a camera." "I like to take pictures" I said as I put the camera away. I was told photography was no allowed on school grounds. Minutes later I was handed a photo of my grandson taken by a "Mom" shot with a P&S the day before, inside the fenced playground.

My son is a food vendor at the local concert venue in WPB,FL. I was in the food court snapping the croud at dusk. I was just practicing technique not looking for anything to print or post. I was told "professional cameras" were not allowed in the seating areas. I replied that I knew that and would respect the regulation. She was suprised that I didn't object and felt it necessary to restate her point twice more. There must have been a million shots taken with camera phones and point and shoots as I sat and watched The Police play.

You're paranoid!

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In France (where I live) there has been a mix of pedophile paranoia and a very profit-oriented kind of a privacy concept. The result in photography magazines is sad to see: Nearly all of the "peoples" (pronounced "purple") photos have been taken in India or in Africa or somewhere where the subjects are not so copyright oriented.

Most of the time, people want money to be in a picture taken for instance in a front of a building. the Magazines are full of legal advice as to how to go about and publish a picture with maybe 50 different people in it. Photographers stuff their bags with pre-filled forms. They have to have a personal lawyer. Of course, you are still allowed to take pictures of your own children but even there the risk exists that they will sue you once over 18.

It is really a shame. France is after all the home country of Henry Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau. Neither of them could work here any more.

I personally cannot understand what is so dangerous in photography. Rather, I would see that somebosy whose picture has been out there for all to see is a Somebody, a person that would catch the eye in the event that he'd be abducted.

Somehow, there is the same kind of paranoia against photography as there is against our deodorants and toothpastes in the airports. People feel the danger of terrorists and pedophiles and they react in an emotional way that has very little to do with any real security issues. We see a lot of fuss being made and we sort of accept it as part of our security. Something is being done, after all.

Is it rational, is it effective, does it serve a purpose?
My opinion is no. Or,well, it does. It serves the establishment, they get a chance to show how good they are in protecting us... against ourselves. Do we need that?
Evidently, some of us feel they do. And they have the power.
We gave it to them.
(Orwell saw a lot of things before they happened)

You should be more afraid of your neighbors, friends and family. Most of the time people of that type are close to their victims.

In any case it's more rare than the media and gov't like to make it seem.

yeah...and in all the TV series the baddies are stalking with big lenses and tripods, never with point-and-shoots or cellular phones...so anybody with a serious lens is a stalking baddie. Hollywood and reality are mixed together and we suffer.

We'll see, once baddies arrive on the 21st century, cellular phones will be the source of paranoia!

Stickman, I used to work in pediatrics and it was >95 per cent of the time the family or the "neo-family" who produced the traumas...

The Google ad's at the top of this page (here anyway) made me laugh. Mostly domestic violence and how to protect yourself by learning close combat techniques!

echo, I am not sure what else google thinks you have been looking at recently, but my ads are all photography related: 2x camera ads and 2x for galleries.

Google serves ad's that match the content of a page. I know how this works, I use these ad's myself as an advertiser and as a publisher. Like I mentioned, here those kinds of ad's are showing but the ad's are regional, over in your area they're likely to be different. The ones showing now are about child protection.

philthejuggler wrote in post #5473621
I have decided on a compromise solution. I take lots of photos of children of friends / family so if I post a random assortment then no-one will know which is mine and which isn't!

I hope you're joking... talk about double standards!

DocFrankenstein wrote in post #5557518
I hope you're joking... talk about double standards!

Does sound a bit hypocritical, but I thought putting lots of pics up there would remove any slight vestige of doubt that someone might track my kids down. They wouldn't know which were mine and which were friends / customers kids that could be anywhere.

Actually, my final decision is not to post pictures of my kids at all. I'd kinda convinced myself it wasn't a problem, but I'd failed to convince my wife!

Phil

Rhinotherunt wrote in post #5471281
Don't give names and locations...

Exactly.

That's a bit contrived, pedophiles on POTN looking to hunt children down?

The risk of the above is exponentially lower than many other much more serious risks for your children. Worrying about such an unreasonable risk is paranoia in my opinion, yes.

philthejuggler wrote in post #5559394
Does sound a bit hypocritical, but I thought putting lots of pics up there would remove any slight vestige of doubt that someone might track my kids down. They wouldn't know which were mine and which were friends / customers kids that could be anywhere.

So, it's ok if someone molests the neighbour's kids... or the kids of the clients... as long as the chances of your kids getting it are lower. lol

You're a more honest guy than I am.

DocFrankenstein wrote in post #5560579
So, it's ok if someone molests the neighbour's kids... or the kids of the clients... as long as the chances of your kids getting it are lower. lol

You're a more honest guy than I am.

No - what I mean't was that if there were 500 pictures of kids posted by me, with mine amongst them no one would bother tracking me down specifically because they wouldn't know which if any were mine so the whole tracking exercise would be pointless!!!

There is no way I'd knowlingly endanger any kids!