After the water boiled over, and the sun boiled over, at least two parents in Richmond are boiling over as No School Season wanes.
What we wanted for our rising kindergartener this summer was to get a taste of the routine of getting up, getting out of the house, and learning in new environments. As we reach the conclusion of about seven or eight or nine weeks of camps at four different locations, all with different start and end times and snack rules, nobody in this house ever really had a great grasp on the schedule.
But one feature was consistent from one camp to the next: Each one wanted to take our money and use our kid as a billboard on Terrible Social Media Platforms that are owned by People Who do Terrible Things.
Zuckerberg and his digital global health hazards that are causing real harm. Musk and his sieg heiling election interference. Neither should be trusted with pictures of our children.
This shouldn’t be a controversial opinion, and it should be the default position of any institution charged with caring for children. But time and time again, we found ourselves competing for one of too-few open camp spots, spending hundreds of dollars, and then being told that our child’s unbearably charming, gap-toothed smile was also authorized content on all social platforms and media in perpetuity.
We sent in requests to exclude. We wrote “I Do Not” on the social media consent form that was required to participate in one camp. They relented.
We invite parents to read the fine print and opt out of giving their kids away as free content. More important, we hope parents will join us in demanding that permission be sought for photos rather than implied.
We won’t single out which institutions were especially burdensome. But among four separate camps, opting-in was never an option. Every single one put the burden on parents to say, “No, we didn’t pay you a bunch of money so you could take pictures of our kids for free and give them to billionaires.”
The push for content is as vague as it is unneeded. While some of these camps have simply stated these photos could be used in any context at any time, for any reason, others have stated they were to ensure consistent enrollment.
But the numbers don’t lie. The race to register as camps rapidly fill up tells us that they aren’t exactly in dire need to promote. We are talking blink-and-you’ll-miss-it popularity. If these camp sign-ups were on StubHub, the clamor would be that much more intense.
So why should we be automatically inclined to let our child’s image be used to train Meta’s bots? There is no way for a camp or a museum, for example, to opt out of uploaded media being used to train Meta’s AI models. And as social media companies scale back on moderation, most of the camp website traffic received from any X promo would likely be bots. One estimate says that nearly 80% of clicks on ads on that platform are not from humans.
We invite parents to read the fine print and opt out of giving their kids away as free content. More important, we hope parents will join us in demanding that permission be sought for photos rather than implied.
As funding for arts, science, culture, and the outdoors gets thrashed, trust as a currency is going to be more valuable than ever. We need to build it together. Both parents and institutions can start by understanding who benefits when we ignore the guardrails of privacy and ethical online practices.
Catherine MacDonald is a gerontologist who studies growing up in modern society as part of her job at Virginia Commonwealth University (though her views expressed do not represent her employer). Her husband Tom Nash is a former Style Weekly reporter and proxy for FOIA nonprofit MuckRock (https://www.muckrock.com/). They share writing duties for the On Parenting column.
Have a thought about parenting in Richmond that you want to share with them? Email editor@styleweekly.com.
