Fight over photos likely to hurt you

Dear Carolyn: Is it unreasonable for my expecting wife and me to ask her family not to post pictures of our baby on Facebook once he’s here? Among various reasons, as we are learning more and more every day, nothing is truly private. In addition, we don’t want some corporation to use his image without asking, and especially in the case of my sister-in-law, who friends people she doesn’t know, we don’t want potential predators to have access to our baby’s face. Are we crazy for even wanting to ask this of my in-laws? – Anonymous

Crazy, no. Unrealistic? Getting warmer.

When you raise a child, there are battles waiting for you to choose them – or walk by – like bags of chips in the snack aisle. The best advice I have for anyone in this aisle is to choose the battles that withstand an effort-benefit analysis.

Responding warmly to your baby even when you’re exhausted and emotionally spent, for example, provides benefits far in excess of the effort it takes to smile. Providing the best education your money can buy, too – hard to go wrong there.

But a crusade against unauthorized use of photos sounds doomed in the very language of your question: “as we are learning more and more every day, nothing is truly private.”

You can master privacy settings, yes; you can respectfully ask people not to post photos of your child; you can express your reservations to your sister-in-law and invite her cooperation.

But project into the future a bit to the time she posts one anyway. What will you say or do then? How likely is it that someone bad will zero in on your child’s image from among the random millions of images on Facebook alone, fix upon it, and do harm? And, by comparison, how likely is it that you’ll harm your family relationships by trying to assert so much control over relatives? You’re looking at a very scary but minuscule chance of happening, versus not scary but very likely to happen.