Zoo Fun & More

We heard that Spongebob Squarepants was going to be at the Zoo so Greg and I decided to take the twins, even though we went a few weeks ago.  The trip went much better with Greg there, the twins stayed in their strollers the whole time and behaved really well.  We went to see Spongebob but there was a huge line and they were asking for a $5 donation.  Greg and I never have cash so we skipped visiting Spongebob and enjoyed all the animals.

We had one day last week that was warm and I have been dying to see the twins in their new swimming suites so I put them in their swimming suites and let them play with the sprinkler hose. 

They had a lot of fun!

Torn

I love the social world.  I like sharing my photos of our family with friends and family across the internet but lately I have had a rash of bad experiences and now I am questioning how much exposure is too much.  I have always known that putting pictures out there, there would be a chance of pervs looking at them but the alternative is to not put any photos out there and I love taking and sharing photos.

I like my flickr account, I like that I can purge my photos there of our daily life and share them, it creates a cool slide show on my blog, it was huge in helping create my books for the twins and I in turn enjoy looking at others photos on flickr and have often been inspired but a couple of weeks ago I received a message from another flickr member about how much they loved my daughter and she is the most beautiful girl they had ever seen.  Now if that is where it had ended I might of been flattered but they went on to talk about how much joy they got from looking at her photos and no one will ever understand how happy they were when I upload new photos and was wondering if they could use her photos for their pleasure.  And they ended with saying who knows maybe one day they hope to call her their daughter.  I was beyond creeped out, it made me start to seriously think about how many other creeps are out there looking at or using photos of my children.  I did some research and photos that I put in flickr will come up when you do searches on yahoo or google in the images.  So any one in the world with internet can get to my photos.  Of course their are options of making my photos private but then for friends and family to view them they would need to create or be logged into a flickr account.  So I am battling with just deleting the account all together.

I thought I could delete my flickr account and just use facebook more because there I can mark the photos so only friends of mine can view the photos.  But of course there are loop holes there and I even found people who are posting tips and tricks for how to view hidden or private images on facebook.  And then last week my mom called me and told me she found a facebook profile of a girl in Dubai using a photo that I took of the twins as her facebook profile.  I was furious and sent her a message to immediately remove the image which she didn't so I am in the process of reporting the image as violating the copyright law and having facebook delete it form her account.

So for the past couple of weeks this has been weighing on me.  How much is too much?  Should I delete my flickr account or am I being too sensitive?  Should I limit the photos I post to flickr, facebook and even my blog or maybe just stop posting pictures all together?  I also learned that photos you upload to blogger are uploaded to a photo sharing source called Picasa and people in the Picasa community can browse your photos unless you go in and set them to be unlisted.  Please let me know your opinions.

Sorry I just had to get that out there.  On a lighter note the twins are turning 2 in 9 days!  I have been so busy I just barely finished their invitations and will put them in the mail tomorrow!