Blog safety?

[npace19147]

To give me something to occupy my time while on bed rest, I set up a family blog. A few pictures, mostly text about us and how bored I am. Well, my inlaws have *freaked* saying it opens us up to stalkers, child pornographers, Satan, what-have-you.

While I have not made the blog password protected, I opted not to have it listed anywhere and have not made it generally available or searchable.

So I'm wondering what mamas here think about the safety issue. DH is undecided and will leave it up to me. Any insights? TIA!

[sarahsthreads]

This is a tough one. Last summer, someone stole all of the pictures I had uploaded of DD, created a fake journal and posted on a number of discussion boards claiming DD was HER daughter. It was a tense week getting all of those things taken down, but the administrators of the sites did it quickly and thoroughly. I password-protected a good portion of my blog after that. BUT. I'm planning on taking the password protection off those posts now. See, the very reason I even found out about what happened is that some of the other people on the discussion boards had seen the images on my blog and emailed me through my blog to tell me what was going on. If this person had managed to steal my images even though they weren't technically public - and there are ways around almost any method of protecting things on the web - I would not have found out about it unless I had stumbled on those boards myself.

I'm going to visibly watermark all of my images instead, figuring that the random person doing this is not going to want to crop dozens of images to get the watermark out, and the people who would take the time to do it? They're going to do what they're going to do with my stuff on the web whether or not the posts and images are password protected.

There are a lot of bad people on the 'net. There are a lot of bad people in real life, too. I'm more worried about the woman in the grocery store who can't stop admiring how cute DD is following me home and kidnapping her than I am about some stranger somehow finding me through my blog and kidnapping DD that way. (And I'm not THAT worried about the first scenario, either, since we have two very large and very loud dogs who think a kid walking home from school down the street is worthy of warning us about.)

If YOU are comfortable with it, and you're not posting your home address and full name on your blog, then I think it's OK. To be safer, you should probably avoid mentioning the name of your hometown, and you might even want to use initials only for your DH's and children's names. My blog had too long a history before DD came along to wipe out all of those possible personal details. As to how to convince your in-laws that it's OK...just don't tell them my story. ;)

Sarah :)