Anonymity

Something seems to have come up on twitter recently, both myself and someone else (i can't remember who it was) realised that even if you're account is locked, you can be tweeted by people who don't follow you.

This lead me to think about overall internet privacy especially in regards to adoption. I'm normally quite an open person and don't hide much but recently, i've become more and more aware of the impact that could have on our children. 

We don't know the background that our children come from and don't know how safe we will be to put details about them online in any form. We don't know who might be watching everything we tweet, what is there to stop a genuine birth parent from posing as an adopter, getting talking to one of us and then discovering who you are just because you've slipped up without thinking on a couple of things and then have them turn up on a twitter meet up that you invited them to where your children are there? 

That absolutely terrifies me, the children that we end up adopting are going to come from a situation that is at best detrimental to their health and development but could well be life threatening. 

It's a big 'if' when you're talking about these things but you just don't know who knows who, how many times have you seen a friend talking to someone on Facebook that you know from a completely different social circle? What if one of their friends is a friend of a birth parent? Especially if you adopt through a fairly local authority, these things can and i'm sure do happen.

We've decided between us that we won't be announcing the genders of our children, their ages or birthdays, any of their physical features, no pictures from the neck up (maybe even not at all), no names, basically nothing that can be used to identify them. 

The same goes for us though, we won't tell people on twitter anything recognisable about us unless we actually meet them. No jobs, no birthdays, no anniversaries, no 'we're going to see X in concert tonight', no mention of the region we live in, no mention of the name of our agency, as little as possible. 

The risk to our children is just too great, lots of chance things have to come together for anyone significant to find us but it's possible. Nothing on the internet is ever safe and as the most basic thing,  it'll be our job as parents to make sure that our children are.