Good for you! The idea of privacy was non-existent when the internet started up, and many of us who have been online since the beginning tend to be much too casual about it. I know that over the last fifteen years I have been much more aware and cautious; on the other hand, I am more active due to my writing. However, there are considerable differences in the risks for a 50+-year-old male who is established in his profession and a 13-year-old just starting in the world. My online footprint is large and diverse enough that a single stupid post is unlikely to stand out from the mass of other data. Plug my name into google, and there is a fair amount of information that pops up, quite a bit of it just due to the length of my time online. I would hope that even without the care you are taking that younger people would have smaller online presences. The pattern seems to exist at least in the small scale doing quick searches of my children, and younger relatives show much smaller presences that my search. However, my wife and I never went to the extremes that your family seems to have with documenting our children’s lives online. That would have an impact on the size of the footprint you make online.

Good article and interesting food for thought, good to see people starting to be aware of this much earlier. Maybe your generation can help clean up some of the mess my parent’s generation and mine seems to have left for my kids and your age. Sad but true people my age and older seem to be punting problems down the road to let the next couple of generations deal with serious issues we are ignoring.