No more bombarding childless friends and colleagues with daily photos of Junior’s milestones – or, more importantly, creating a permanent public digital legacy that may come back to haunt their offspring in later years.
Gold Coast, Australia (PRWEB) September 19, 2014
A new social network has been launched that aims to assist modern parents suffering from ‘oversharenting’ — the all-too-common phenomenon of parents oversharing the minutiae of their childrens' lives online.
mykidlet.com is a free social networking site designed exclusively for parents, providing a private and secure platform to share photos, videos, and personal updates to a closed audience. No more bombarding childless friends and colleagues with daily photos of Junior’s milestones – or, more importantly, creating a permanent public digital legacy that may come back to haunt their offspring in later years.
The mykidlet.com website offers users all the benefits of a regular social network – like the ability to comment and share and connect with those they care about – however with more robust privacy. It’s a password-protected portal that’s not trawled by search engines, so users photos aren’t indexed or searchable on the web. People can only view a user’s images if they’ve been directly given access to do so. mykidlet.com launched in public beta release in August 2014.
According to mykidlet.com founder Cameron Baker, privacy is of growing concern to the parents of today. “Some parents don’t think twice about uploading galleries of images of their children online daily, yet there’s a growing movement who are increasingly cautious about posting photos, names and other facts about their children on social media as many websites allow easy access to user’s images and sensitive personal information. Even deleted material can still be found online years later. Yet as all parents know, there’s something really special about sharing parenting’s big ups and downs and major milestones with family and friends. That’s where mykidlet.com comes in.”
Users simply create a free account, invite a select group of friends and relatives to share updates with, and then upload content they want to share. Users can also create events, or share and seek parenting advice by creating or joining groups of interest to them.
Aside from postings in mykidlet.com’s group forums, the only people who can see and comment on status updates, photos or videos uploaded to a personal profile are the people a user has directly invited to connect with them. No newsfeeds pushing images to friends of friends or extended networks – it’s all about regaining control of personal content.
“A photo of your child’s first time on the potty might be funny for now, but if that photo is still able to be found on search engines when they’re a teen, well that’d be more than embarrassing. By creating a mykidlet.com profile, users have a private place to share their parenting journey with a network of friends and relatives,” said Baker.
By using closed networks like mykidlet.com and limiting posting photos and information about the children in open online avenues, parents may avoid creating a public archive that could cause problems if accessed at a later date. Extremes like online predators gleaning personal information aside, the content posted on social media today could very well be likely to be accessed in the future by institutions ranging from colleges to recruitment agencies.
Already, about 75 percent of employers are using search engines such as Google to research potential job candidates. 3 in 4 recruitment managers researched candidates social media profiles even if they weren’t provided, while 1 in 3 had rejected an applicant based on unfavourable content found online.
While many modern parents encourage their kids to be careful with the content they post online, as more institutions turn to the web to research candidates parents will also increasingly need to shoulder greater responsibility for protecting their child’s online reputation. Imagine a teen rejected from gaining an apprenticeship or university scholarship because a parent had offloaded a few barrages on social media about how argumentative their child could be, or how they’d trashed the house while they were away on holidays. “By creating a place that’s not publicly accessible for parents to share their joys and frustrations, mykidlet.com aims to be a helpful addition to the online social stratosphere – a rare place where oversharenting isn’t just welcome, it’s expected and embraced,” Baker said.
