Hi, my wife decided to create a new email for our newborn daughter which my wife would use to send updates to our relatives about what is going on in our daughter life.
My wife is using gmail, I do use proton. She has created a new gmail account but I have asked her to reconsider and to create a new account on proton privacy wise. What arguments would you use for my case?
Thanks.
Have you considered putting letters written on paper in the post?
Seems unwise to give your child’s early life story to any of these companies, especially when mapped to a network of her relatives and likely including photographs which people may not be as diligent to keep private as you.
Your daughter cannot consent to this, and it is your duty as parents to protect her privacy until she is old enough to decide for herself what to share and where.
Why not use the emails you guys already have? I don’t think I or even you guys would want to use an email created by parents, since the username might not even be something they would have chosen for themselves.
Let them have an email when they are old enough to create their own. Use something like simplelogin maybe instead for an alias email instead that still comes to your email but looks separate for relatives it is sent to? I wouldn’t want a premaid email account of my own before I was old enough.
The problem isnt gmail, the problem is using an email for this purpose. Switching to protonmail wont make a difference. If you want privacy, use a different communications protocol. For example, use signal, and if anyone wants baby updates, they better install it too, cause thats the only way you’ll send them.
Well, unless you convert everyone else to proton or similar services, you’re kinda screwed on the privacy end of things already. I mean, it’s better than nothing, I guess, but it’s you’re sending to addresses that aren’t privacy friendly, it’s still exposed on the recipient’s end.
Not worth arguing about on that level.
Now, if the account is actually going to be the kid’s some day, that’s different. You can make the point of making sure that their first account with an “all in one” provider be with a service that’s a better “business neighbor” for all the associated services. Keep the Google account for the very few things that can’t be avoided, but shift primary usage of email, password management, etc to the less obnoxious service provider because they’re a better service rather than arguing about practically non existent privacy in email.
a demonstration of how easy it is to use proton drive (to share videos and millions of photos she’s going to dump on relatives who are barely interested in seeing another baby photo) and protonMail would be more convincing.
Privacy interfaces have evolved to be attractive to lambda users.
when it comes to your wife uploading your daughters photographs to google servers, she can’t decide alone: you share the authority (but would this argument matter in a marriage? No?
would having a protonMail matter if the photographs are attachments and recipients have gmail? No.
You’re broadcasting to family who will likely be using gmail, so what difference does it make? Google will get all the emails either way. Anyway, logical argumentation is completely useless in a personal situation like that.
If you want the address to be stable in the long term, you should probably use your own domain name instead of gmail or proton, if you’re not already doing that. After that, it’s possible to switch the hosting without changing the email address.
This is just called actually understanding your threat model and fully evaluating the controls available to you. Basic information security.
The most secure password policy in the world doesn’t matter if your users just write them down on sticky notes on their desks. Security on your end doesn’t matter if you’re sending the data to an insecure destination.
Id have been so pissed if my parents had destroyed any hope of privacy before i could tell them how fucked up that is. Your child didnt consent to letting google read about its life and see its pictures.
Whats her issue with using proton? It has all the features of google plus your setting ur kid up with a private ecosystem that will make them one of the very few who may have any hope of digital privacy in the future.
Could also just show her this comment chain where she can learn from us armchair experts.
to the same note, you shouldn’t upload images of them anywhere. not facebook, not google (drive or any other service), not facebook messenger, but not even anywhere encrypted.
take the images with a regular camera, or a phone that does not give any apps storage access permissions, and have physical prints, which can be viewed every time they visit you. you will need to tell them they can’t take photos of the children nor the photo album.
this has worked well forag es, they shouldn’t be so entitled to images.
if I were you, I would require all guests to leave all their phones on a shelf near the main door. It’ll not only prevent photos, but also increase quality time by them not scrolling facebook and such while there.
before you tell them this, let them know firmly that you’re not doing this for one, but for child safety and basic human rights, and that in your house it’s you who make the rules. and keep in mind, that even when you are the guest, you hold the rights to disallow making pictures of your children until they are old enough to make the decision fur themselves.
why don’t use even the private cloud services?
the reason is your relatives who you trusted, will probably download the videos, and reshare them with others through the services you wanted to avoid. also consider that most of them doesn’t have any information hygiene, they won’t even know they are doing something bad, they won’t understand and will hand-wave all your concerns away.
this is not just a technical problem, but also a people problem, which cannot be solved with tech.
if your wife does not cooperate, you won’t be able to protect your children to the level you want. of course don’t divorce over that or something, it’s not worth it, you can probably still do lots. maybe over time, going slower and you can be forming your family’s privacy habits.
but I also have to mention, I wouldn’t want to live with someone who is not intereinterested in any level about personal privacy. if you have got so far that you’re having kids, this is probably not the case for you.
as last words, don’t take this as a strong “don’t take any pictures” stance. yes, do take pictures, they’ll be very good to have later, but make sure that you can keep control over them, for your children’s safety.
and don’t get (too) mad if parents in the class will take group pictures on which they are there. that’s something else, and hopefully relatively rare. best you can do with that is teach your children about why they might not want it, the reasons you don’t want it to be uploaded to facebook and such, and that they agree on this they can request the parents to be more careful.
Normie’s wont like the extremity of this but even a little shift towards privacy is better than nothing. I feel the issue is someone like op is trying to convince someone to take a tiny little privacy step then u make some very valid points about what more can be done then said normie goes its too hard and doesnt do anything at all.
I understand you. But I think what I recommend can be implemented very simply: not uploading anything anywhere. that’s really the simplest, and friends should not feel entitled to anything, because they aren’t. if they (the friends) don’t understand it, that is a people problem of selfishness
I would just tell her that you should really not ever “create an account for your newborn child” who may not want their whole childhood documented on the internet forever later on in their life.
For all you know they may not turn out to keep being your daughter forever. It’s kind of a gross overstepping of parental boundaries and something that should be left for them to decide.
This doesn’t mean you can’t keep records in case they want them in the future but as someone that grew up well before all this social media stuff it sort of terrifies me regarding the privacy and agency of younger generations.
Makes me glad I have always been extremely averse to having any sort of photos of me or any of my personal information anywhere online that I did not post till well into my 30s.
Do with this information what you will but I had that boundary crossed just with photos and such shared around way before I had any way to consent to it and some aspects still make me feel violated to this day and there is nothing I can do about it.
It’s an email account, not social media so I think this is a ridiculous take. It’s inherently private and only shared with people you explicitly send it to, such as family.
For all you know they may not turn out to keep being your daughter forever. It’s kind of a gross overstepping of parental boundaries
Such a shoehorned, irrelevant point that won’t apply to 99% of the population. This sounds like a you problem that you’re projecting onto others, and it’s honestly rude to say that it’s a gross overstepping of parental boundaries.
This is no different to me having a email dedicated to searching for a house to give to real estate agents and someone saying “I don’t think it’s legal that a house has an email”. It was frustrating reading up until your comment that people just didn’t get it.
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Have you considered putting letters written on paper in the post?
Seems unwise to give your child’s early life story to any of these companies, especially when mapped to a network of her relatives and likely including photographs which people may not be as diligent to keep private as you.
Your daughter cannot consent to this, and it is your duty as parents to protect her privacy until she is old enough to decide for herself what to share and where.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/21/23315513/google-photos-csam-scanning-account-deletion-investigation
Google looks. Google reports. Even if you did nothing wrong you’re guilty until you prove innocent and even then you’ll never get your account back.
Your daughter’s Google account can be closed without appeal. All the memories gone. This less likely to happen using Proton or Tuta.
Why not use the emails you guys already have? I don’t think I or even you guys would want to use an email created by parents, since the username might not even be something they would have chosen for themselves.
Let them have an email when they are old enough to create their own. Use something like simplelogin maybe instead for an alias email instead that still comes to your email but looks separate for relatives it is sent to? I wouldn’t want a premaid email account of my own before I was old enough.
The problem isnt gmail, the problem is using an email for this purpose. Switching to protonmail wont make a difference. If you want privacy, use a different communications protocol. For example, use signal, and if anyone wants baby updates, they better install it too, cause thats the only way you’ll send them.
Well, unless you convert everyone else to proton or similar services, you’re kinda screwed on the privacy end of things already. I mean, it’s better than nothing, I guess, but it’s you’re sending to addresses that aren’t privacy friendly, it’s still exposed on the recipient’s end.
Not worth arguing about on that level.
Now, if the account is actually going to be the kid’s some day, that’s different. You can make the point of making sure that their first account with an “all in one” provider be with a service that’s a better “business neighbor” for all the associated services. Keep the Google account for the very few things that can’t be avoided, but shift primary usage of email, password management, etc to the less obnoxious service provider because they’re a better service rather than arguing about practically non existent privacy in email.
I don’t get the whole email thing, people are already doing that stuff on Facebook and your relatives are probably there too.
And someone in your family at some point will take a picture of your kid and put it up on whatever the social media of choice is.
“arguments” alone don’t suffice.
a demonstration of how easy it is to use proton drive (to share videos and millions of photos she’s going to dump on relatives who are barely interested in seeing another baby photo) and protonMail would be more convincing.
Privacy interfaces have evolved to be attractive to lambda users.
when it comes to your wife uploading your daughters photographs to google servers, she can’t decide alone: you share the authority (but would this argument matter in a marriage? No?
would having a protonMail matter if the photographs are attachments and recipients have gmail? No.
good luck. Not an easy task
Wait until she’s old enough to decide for herself. I would be really jacked off to find my parents had put my life online from the minute I was born.
And Google of all the ones she could have chosen? Your wife needs to have a good talk with herself.
You’re broadcasting to family who will likely be using gmail, so what difference does it make? Google will get all the emails either way. Anyway, logical argumentation is completely useless in a personal situation like that.
If you want the address to be stable in the long term, you should probably use your own domain name instead of gmail or proton, if you’re not already doing that. After that, it’s possible to switch the hosting without changing the email address.
The only sane answer in this whole thread.
i see that years or decades of frustration in the face of “i have nothing to hide” comes off as insanity to you :/
This is just called actually understanding your threat model and fully evaluating the controls available to you. Basic information security.
The most secure password policy in the world doesn’t matter if your users just write them down on sticky notes on their desks. Security on your end doesn’t matter if you’re sending the data to an insecure destination.
Same concepts apply to privacy.
m’kay
Id have been so pissed if my parents had destroyed any hope of privacy before i could tell them how fucked up that is. Your child didnt consent to letting google read about its life and see its pictures.
Whats her issue with using proton? It has all the features of google plus your setting ur kid up with a private ecosystem that will make them one of the very few who may have any hope of digital privacy in the future.
Could also just show her this comment chain where she can learn from us armchair experts.
the pejorative “armchair expert” wouldn’t apply here as the fieldwork is essentially chair based.
:)
Shit hes right
to the same note, you shouldn’t upload images of them anywhere. not facebook, not google (drive or any other service), not facebook messenger, but not even anywhere encrypted.
take the images with a regular camera, or a phone that does not give any apps storage access permissions, and have physical prints, which can be viewed every time they visit you. you will need to tell them they can’t take photos of the children nor the photo album. this has worked well forag es, they shouldn’t be so entitled to images.
if I were you, I would require all guests to leave all their phones on a shelf near the main door. It’ll not only prevent photos, but also increase quality time by them not scrolling facebook and such while there.
before you tell them this, let them know firmly that you’re not doing this for one, but for child safety and basic human rights, and that in your house it’s you who make the rules. and keep in mind, that even when you are the guest, you hold the rights to disallow making pictures of your children until they are old enough to make the decision fur themselves.
why don’t use even the private cloud services?
the reason is your relatives who you trusted, will probably download the videos, and reshare them with others through the services you wanted to avoid. also consider that most of them doesn’t have any information hygiene, they won’t even know they are doing something bad, they won’t understand and will hand-wave all your concerns away.
this is not just a technical problem, but also a people problem, which cannot be solved with tech.
if your wife does not cooperate, you won’t be able to protect your children to the level you want. of course don’t divorce over that or something, it’s not worth it, you can probably still do lots. maybe over time, going slower and you can be forming your family’s privacy habits.
but I also have to mention, I wouldn’t want to live with someone who is not intereinterested in any level about personal privacy. if you have got so far that you’re having kids, this is probably not the case for you.
as last words, don’t take this as a strong “don’t take any pictures” stance. yes, do take pictures, they’ll be very good to have later, but make sure that you can keep control over them, for your children’s safety.
and don’t get (too) mad if parents in the class will take group pictures on which they are there. that’s something else, and hopefully relatively rare. best you can do with that is teach your children about why they might not want it, the reasons you don’t want it to be uploaded to facebook and such, and that they agree on this they can request the parents to be more careful.
Normie’s wont like the extremity of this but even a little shift towards privacy is better than nothing. I feel the issue is someone like op is trying to convince someone to take a tiny little privacy step then u make some very valid points about what more can be done then said normie goes its too hard and doesnt do anything at all.
I understand you. But I think what I recommend can be implemented very simply: not uploading anything anywhere. that’s really the simplest, and friends should not feel entitled to anything, because they aren’t. if they (the friends) don’t understand it, that is a people problem of selfishness
wow this got to be quite long. sorry for that!
I would just tell her that you should really not ever “create an account for your newborn child” who may not want their whole childhood documented on the internet forever later on in their life.
For all you know they may not turn out to keep being your daughter forever. It’s kind of a gross overstepping of parental boundaries and something that should be left for them to decide.
This doesn’t mean you can’t keep records in case they want them in the future but as someone that grew up well before all this social media stuff it sort of terrifies me regarding the privacy and agency of younger generations.
Makes me glad I have always been extremely averse to having any sort of photos of me or any of my personal information anywhere online that I did not post till well into my 30s.
Do with this information what you will but I had that boundary crossed just with photos and such shared around way before I had any way to consent to it and some aspects still make me feel violated to this day and there is nothing I can do about it.
It’s an email account, not social media so I think this is a ridiculous take. It’s inherently private and only shared with people you explicitly send it to, such as family.
Such a shoehorned, irrelevant point that won’t apply to 99% of the population. This sounds like a you problem that you’re projecting onto others, and it’s honestly rude to say that it’s a gross overstepping of parental boundaries.
A newborn doesn’t need an email address
yeah but we think it’s nice to send the updates to family from her email, not from ours.
is it legal at all to have an email address at that age?
The baby didn’t create the account?
you are totally right, it was created for the baby, in the name of her
fortunately we dont live in the usa
does the USA have such a law? Honestly I would be surprised.
I’m talking with the EU in mind. Probably GDPR, but there may be other laws affecting it
OP didn’t state their wife’s age but it is a safe assumption they are old enough to sign up for an email address.
Obviously I didn’t talk about the wife’s age, but of the newborn for whom the wife has made a google account
This is no different to me having a email dedicated to searching for a house to give to real estate agents and someone saying “I don’t think it’s legal that a house has an email”. It was frustrating reading up until your comment that people just didn’t get it.