Interesting BBC article, “Do baby blogs violate children’s privacy?” I don’t have any kids (yet), but the issue of privacy has come up. And I have a blog for my dog, so it only seems fair to have one for the kids.
It all raises odd privacy issues that I don’t know how to answer. When people can scour your blog for personal information and use it against you, what can you do? There’s a certain risk you run in making some information known, and I don’t know any way around that.
It’s especially difficult for me, running a business out of my home where I can’t exactly hide personal information like my address. I also don’t want to separate my blog and my business, since as odd as this blog is, it does display some knowledge and expertise. Basically my writing, my livlihood, my interests, and my personal life are too closely intertwined to keep ’em separated.
Odd dilemmas the digital world brings.
Simple solutions:
Password protection and a robots.txt file.
The first keeps unwanted visitors out and the second keeps search engines out.
This is not a new problem ;-)
And, as for ‘hiding’ your address… there are P.O. Boxes. The UPS store also has mail boxes with real street addresses you can rent.
There is domain registration by proxy if you don’t want your address in the domain registry.
All not cheap, but it can be done ;-)