Blog/internet privacy question

[Formerly SK]

I'm sure there are some brilliant IT guys who could help me....

I've had a pretty active mommy blog for six years now. For maybe the first four years it was 100% publicly available. About two years ago (when my kids' friends could potentially know how to read and find it) I made the blog private so that only email addresses allowed by me could view it. Now my kids are even older (6 and almost 8) and I'm thinking I need to take it offline completely. My worry is that 30 years from now, even though the blog is private, there will be software of some sort that you can buy for $19.99 and it will find every word ever written about you online.

The downside to going offline is I have about five people who live for my blog (grandparents) and would die if it ended. So my idea is to continue writing (which I would do anyway) but just do it in Word and then email the entries to those select people.

DH thinks I'm nuts for worrying about posting the kids' lives online in a private blog - that 30 years from now no one will be able to find data from a secured source. His other argument, though, is that if I change to a email/Word system the attached files would have passed through the internet so the info would be "out there" anyway.

I'm not a tech person AT ALL (neither is he). Are my fears groundless? Does DH have a legitimate point about emailing attachments? I truly hate the idea of taking the blog entries away from long distance relatives, yet my children's privacy is important to me, too. Anyone have any advice?

[Sam_2.0]

SK - can you change to doing FB notes instead? A bit more private. I would agree with your DH though, anything out there is potentially hack-able. And once its there, its there forever. I went looking up an OLD site I thought I had deleted years ago, and was still able to find some information archived on the web even though the actual pages were long gone.

[Sum Dum Gai]

DH thinks I'm nuts for worrying about posting the kids' lives online in a private blog - that 30 years from now no one will be able to find data from a secured source.

Contrary to popular belief, the info you put on the internet doesn't stay there forever. Memory is cheap, but it's not cheap enough that the entire internet gets archived for posterity. As soon as the servers hosting your blog are taken offline the info goes poof. Like it never existed. Unless it was archived on another server for some reason.

His other argument, though, is that if I change to a email/Word system the attached files would have passed through the internet so the info would be "out there" anyway.

The email service you use, or your internet provider if you're using the email address you got from them, don't archive every single email message and attachment that passes through their system forever and ever amen. Again, storage is cheap, but not that cheap.

The issue is, once you release information either through your blog or emailing it directly to people, you have no control over what they do with it. You might delete the blog entirely, but somebody who's been following it has copied every word of every post and has it archived somewhere. If you send the word doc out to the grandparents, you can't control what they do with it, or how long they keep it. They could republish it in their blog 15 years later and there's nothing you can do about that. The internet itself isn't going to save your information nearly that long though. It doesn't care.

I truly hate the idea of taking the blog entries away from long distance relatives, yet my children's privacy is important to me, too. Anyone have any advice?

Back before my time I hear that parents used to call the long distance grandparents and keep them in the loop that way. When the kids got older they would like talk to the grandparents during these calls too. It was like a direct person to person type interaction and didn't leave messy footprints all over the internet. Or that's what I hear anyway. *shrug*

[Formerly SK]

LOL Dark!

You don't realize I'm a brilliant writer/photographer so they'd rather hear about the grandkids second hand. In all seriousness, though, the writing I do is for me (and the kids eventually - it's like a book I'm writing for them that I'll give them when they're adults). Contemporaneous readership by long distance relatives is just a bonus.

That's a good point about storage. I use Blogger and Gmail. Google is All Powerful now, but I don't know that they will be around in 30 years. As to what other people may do with the posts, that's a good point. I can see grandparents easily forwarding an email I send them, but I know they aren't doing that with my blog (not savvy enough).

Hmmm...points to think about. Thanks for the input.

[Sum Dum Gai]

In all seriousness, though, the writing I do is for me (and the kids eventually - it's like a book I'm writing for them that I'll give them when they're adults). Contemporaneous readership by long distance relatives is just a bonus.

So, you have to decide whether the bonus of having the long distance relatives read your story is worth putting the info out to the general public. If not, by all means write the "book" for the kids, but do it on your own personal computer and don't publish it to the web. If keeping the relatives in the loop does justify putting the info out there publicly, keep doing so and just be cognizant of the fact that everything you're writing could end up being known by everybody when the kids are older. So, cute bed wetting stories or whatever are probably a bad idea. That's not something your kids are going to want out there while they're in high school.

Since your kids are older, a lot of those stories, if they exist and you wrote about them, are potentially already out there, so it's too late to worry about it in any case.

[cubefarmer]

Can't you set the blog for only your viewing? And then maybe start a new one that is more anonymous? No names.

[Formerly SK]

That's an idea...I'll have to think about it. Really, I don't mind it being offline at all. I only like the blog format because it forces me to "finish" writing about a subject since (a few) people will read it. In the past when I've written offline for my own enjoyment, it was too easy to get 90% done with an essay and just let it slide.