Kids Online - the sequel

I may be late in the game on this - or I may be repeating some things I said 12 years ago - not sure which applies. Maybe both.

I wrote earlier this month on the community blog at challies, on the topic of Kids Online. Part of the reason I wrote that, is based on my experience and the wisdom of law enforcement friends of mine.

Recently, another blogger (David W. Boles’ Urban Semiotic) added his take on online safety, in another way, via this post Take Your Children Offline NOW. While I can certainly understand the appeal to online safety, I think it's important to keep things in perspective, and not fuel a fire of knee-jerk reaction, and unrealistic fear.

Now, with that said, let me clarify.

Mr. Boles writes about the danger of having your kid's pics, online. The point is, perverts and sexual deviants might copy them and spoof their angelic little faces onto some depraved shots of x-rated material.

While this is not new (perverts and sexual deviants have been doing this since long before the computer age), it's also not nearly as big of a problem as the real market is.

That real market I refer to is sadly, the child porn market. The real thing has so saturated the internet over the last 12-15 years, that the demand for pic spoofing that Mr. Boles writes about, has practically become null and void.

Does it happen? Yes, it does. How often does it happen? Well, you might want to call your local law enforcement agency that investigates child porn online, and ask them which is the worse problem, real child porn, or pic spoofing. Most of them won't even know what you're talking about, and the ones that will, will be much more concerned about the former, instead of the latter.

Now this is not to say that you should, or shouldn't put your kids pics online. This is something you as a Christian-parent-blogger need to consider for yourselves. This is to say, however, that some of the fear-motivated reaction I've seen from Mr. Boles article, seems to me to be an over-reaction, rather than an informed one.

Razor'sKiss wrote a pretty decent, balanced article on this, here. I would highly recommend it.

Like I said earlier, pic spoofing is not new. Roughly 12 years ago I had a Christian mother email me and pretty much condemn me to hell for posting pics of my girls online. She had just read an article about pic spoofing and since she knew my kids pics were online, I became the worst Christian mother in her eyes. I'd never heard of this, so I called a friend who investigates (on a federal level) child porn on the internet. At that time, he'd been doing this for 26 years (most of those 26 years offline, obviously), and he assured me, that while the practice is real, it's also very uncommon. The reason? Pic spoofers no longer needed it, the real thing was (and is worse now) so easy to get now, that the old practice was dying off, more all the time.

So while there is cause for concern, I think there's also legit cause not to be overly concerned, and react in an uninformed way. In the last couple of days I've read of one woman who was so upset by all this, she hurriedly removed every pic of her family from her site. Her choice of course, but I do think the danger has been overplayed a bit.

Just my 2 cents.

SOLI DEO GLORIA
Carla