Digital Breadcrumbs: Check-ins and Geotagging.

Guest post from Adam of betafam, original available here.
Adam can be found on twitter @betafam

Do You Know Where Your Kids Are? Someone Else Might…

As a parent I always know where my daughter is, she’s only 8 months and can’t go very far without us. But as she grows up and becomes independent her location won’t be as obvious. With all the technology at our disposal, there are plenty of GPS enabled gadgets to keep track of your kids – wrist bands, car modules, etc. Whether or not I venture down that road is yet to be determined and a topic to be discussed at a further date. But who else knows where your kids are? And do you want them to? Here are a couple of ways technology has enabled us to share our location, knowingly and unknowingly.



Check-ins

I rode the check-in train for a while. I told everyone that I was at Starbucks downtown. The sushi place near the office offers a hot sake for 50 cents when you check in. That’s worth it. But aside from free (or cheap) deals, what’s the point? More importantly, is it safe to tell the internet where you are? For me, perhaps. For my kids, no. It’s one of those things that seems fine until something weird and shady happens. And then you freak out.

Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, and now Facebook. It’s a supposed game and if you lose that game, you lose big. Maybe that’s a bit harsh, but it’s the truth. Not only can you announce your location, but Facebook lets your friends tag you at locations. You can adjust this in your privacy settings. There are some scarey people out there, and I don’t think our kids need to be leaving their digital breadcrumbs for someone else to pick up.

Do You Know Where Your Kids Are? Someone Else Might…
As a parent I always know where my daughter is, she’s only 8 months and can’t go very far without us. But as she grows up and becomes independent her location won’t be as obvious. With all the technology at our disposal, there are plenty of GPS enabled gadgets to keep track of your kids – wrist bands, car modules, etc. Whether or not I venture down that road is yet to be determined and a topic to be discussed at a further date. But who else knows where your kids are? And do you want them to? Here are a couple of ways technology has enabled us to share our location, knowingly and unknowingly.
Check-ins
I rode the check-in train for a while. I told everyone that I was at Starbucks downtown. The sushi place near the office offers a hot sake for 50 cents when you check in. That’s worth it. But aside from free (or cheap) deals, what’s the point? More importantly, is it safe to tell the internet where you are? For me, perhaps. For my kids, no. It’s one of those things that seems fine until something weird and shady happens. And then you freak out.
Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, and now Facebook. It’s a supposed game and if you lose that game, you lose big. Maybe that’s a bit harsh, but it’s the truth. Not only can you announce your location, but Facebook lets your friends tag you at locations. You can adjust this in your privacy settings. There are some scarey people out there, and I don’t think our kids need to be leaving their digital breadcrumbs for someone else to pick up.
Geotagging
Geotagging is cool. It lets you attach a location to things using GPS, like pictures you take with your smartphone or tweets you make. Now when I look at old pictures, I know exactly where they were taken. Cool right? Think again. After reading this article on the New York Times I a 180. When I share a geotagged photo, the metadata (location, date, camera, etc) is attached to the picture. So if I upload that picture of Emma eating her sweet potatoes in the kitchen to twitpic, I am telling and showing the world what my daughter looks like, what my house looks like, and where it is located. Combine that with a stream of other photos and you can create a map and picture of my life. Anyone with half a brain can figure out where I live, work, drink coffee, work out, take the kids, etc. This information is a stalker’s dream. I just did all the work for them.
So while it might be helpful to use this to one day do some recon work to figure out where my daughter goes after school, someone else might be doing the same thing. Friend or foe, that brings up major privacy and safety concerns. So what do you do? Well go check out ICanStalkU.org. They are promoting awareness on exactly this issue. More importantly, they tell you how to disable geotagging on your phone. You might not even realize that it is turned on.
So now what?
First, think about how this impacts you as a parent. Should I share this information? Does what I share tell others not just about me, but about my children too? Turn off geotagging or don’t share those pictures on the internet. Be discrete. Know what and where you are sharing.
Second, how should our kids be using this technology, if at all? I think it is ok to use it, but incredibly important for kids to know how and what they are sharing and who can see it.

I have a couple of suggestions to handle the second part:

1. Educate – if your kids know the risks of what they are sharing they can make better decisions and ultimately be safe.
2. Scare – use their digital breadcrumbs to follow them around town, showing them how easy it is for anyone to do. Perhaps knowing that their parents have all this information will give them incentive to actively hide it.
3. Go Lo-Tech – swap out that iPhone for a Jutterbug. I never had an iPhone as a kid, and I survived.

So enjoy your gadgets and apps, but be smart and be safe.