Serving Bread

On my family’s website, we post lots of pictures of our daughter–mostly as a way for family to see her growing up. I title the pictures with cute tags like, “Cute Layla” and “Layla Cutie”–very unique identifications. The other day, when I was looking through the logs of people who visit the website, I noticed there were many people coming from Eastern Europe. When I clicked to find out more, they arrived through a search engine. On this particular website, when you do a search for “naked girl” you get a link to a picture of my little girl who was running around without a shirt on.

I am sure (and hope) that most people who were doing that search did not intend to see a toddler. However, I quickly retitled those pictures and eventually removed them. It is concerning to me that publishing pictures of my family and my daughter could expose us to a world of people who have things in mind other than seeing how darn cute we are. I recently heard a story of someone who published a video on You Tube of their toddler son playing in the bathtub. They forgot to mark that video as private, and received several inquiries from strangers asking that they publish more of these videos online. Apart from feeling both angry and disgusted, I also feel I was too naive in handling publishing pictures on the Internet. Some tips from my experience:

• Be careful what you post on online. As cute as it might be to have a picture of your baby running around naked in the backyard, there may be people who would use that picture for exploitation and sin. Leave those pictures off the internet. If you really must show those pictures to the world, figure out a way to password protect them.
• Use ‘clean’ titles. Search engines index words and will not necessarily differentiate between a clean site and a dirty one. When you title a picture, “Playing naked in the yard” you will get people who do such a search and arrive to your site intending to find something different.
• Fight the crawlers. If you are paranoid, you can download anti-search engine scripts and code that will prevent your site from being indexed by the search engines.
• Attach a logging system. I would have never known the traffic I was getting had I not had some sort of tracking/logging system set up. Check out statcounter.

Finally, this is a word to any stranger who arrived to this post searching for “naked girl” — there is a better way. Visit www.settingcaptivesfree.com.

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