Simple example: Your pretty child is also quite a bit overweight. Or fell and got a big bruise that you for some reason just treated yourself and failed to bring up in some health insurance form.

Less trivial stuff (like having acne) has been used to deny people coverage when they've been diagnosed with cancer.

This is just of the top off my head, which is the point: We simply don't _know_ what might happen in the future. Most probably (and hopefully) not much, put we don't know.

(1) that kid is not overweight and (2) it's actually OK from a medical perspective for a child to be a little overweight, as children grow in bursts, have a much better metabolism and their day is filled with plenty of exercise.

And in fact, if a kid doesn't have some meat on their bones, that's a reason for concern.

Agreed, but you're not making the argument that a potential health insurance company would (like the acne case I mentioned). And again, this is just off the top of my head. One specific case, one specific instance of "I didn't see that coming", while there may be lots and lots of other such cases.

[Edit: To make it clear, I haven't even looked at the picture previously posted, I was providing an unrelated example.]

This level of fear and worry about what an insurance company might try to argue seems too high, and not because insurance companies don't deny people for silly reasons, but because it literally isn't worth the years of fear and worry next to how little it will probably help. There are better sources of reasons to deny people, anyway, than pictures of chubby kids.

Again, this was just _one_ example of the top off my head. I could probably have come up with lots of others. My point being that we don't know how what we post today might be used in the future. Saying that it's not going to have consequences because everyone else will also do it is a very weak argument.

To make it completely clear, I was providing an example completely unrelated to the picture.

>But I don't really understand why people think it's disadvantageous if others can find out whether or not you were cute when you were two years old.

Some examples: you child ends up in a viral video and millions of children all over the world and at his school mock it (e.g the Star Wars Kid, and lots of others). How will that affect his growing up?

Or your kid is not really popular at high school, and some other kids dig up a naked baby pic of his. Nothing special, they just circulate it all around school and make fun of him, and he feels like slicing his wrists or something.

Or the kid posts itself something foolish at 16, which makes him unemployable from every employee that would search for him online.

I'm not claiming that we should share completely without judgement. Just that the vast bulk of things people share are easy to judge as innocuous.

The Star Wars Kid video is not a good counter-example, because it was never intentionally posted online by its creator -- it was found (on a videotape) by other people and posted, and those people knew they were posting it to make fun of it.

> Or your kid is not really popular at high school, and some other kids dig up a naked baby pic of his. Nothing special, they just circulate it all around school and make fun of him, and he feels like slicing his wrists or something.

Firstly, we're not necessarily talking about naked baby pics. The original article is about never posting any photo of their kid online.

Secondly, the kind of bullying you describe presupposes several much bigger problems that are the responsibility of the parent, and it is the behavior of parents that we're discussing.

You're looking at this from the perspective of a bullied kid who just wishes it was easier to hide. But if your kid is so emotionally fragile that having other kids laugh at innocuous baby pictures is enough to make him suicidal, you did a shitty job as a parent.

Lots of parents do, in fact, raise emotionally damaged children who are vulnerable to bullying. But it's not their photo-posting habits that really matters.

You don't see any difference between cute baby pics and star wars kid? I wouldn't put naked baby pics or anything on the internet, but saying no pics at all seems a bit over-paranoid. (And I am about as paranoid as they come).

I think the main issue is that the kids are not given any choice about appearing online when you post their pictures there. They should have at least some choice in the matter, it seems.

Kids have no say in anything... hence why you're liable for them till 18. It's a parents obligation to embarrass them... just easier now with social media.