July 15, 2005

Paranoid about Pedophiles

David Boles is warning all parents to remove all online pictures of their kids, NOW!!!!!!!!

There are likely thousands of pedophiles hiding behind a computer screen somewhere in the world agreeing with every single word you say about your kids. They are buying the shine you are shilling off your children.

Razorskiss provides the counterpoint.

When we post picture of our kids online, we should worry about pedophiles. To an extent. To another extent, I don't think the risks outweigh the benefits.

I used to worry about this type a stuff a bit. Ultimately, I decided that life is too short to spend it worrying about invisible boogie men hiding behind their DSL lines. There are a gazillion pictures on the Internet, with millions more added every day. The needle in the haystack metaphor applies here. If a pedophile has pictures of my kids, its much more likely he took them with a digital camera at the park.

I added images.google.com to my robots.txt file a while ago, but that was primarily to stop ass hats from sucking up my bandwidth by linking to images I'd posted. (My traffic stats dropped about 50% after I did that) None of the pictures that were causing problems were family related at all. Blocking Yahoo and Google image bots from your site will probably eliminate 98% of what little risk is there.

Feel free to cut and paste my robots.txt file. Mine also blocks many of the spam related search bots. Google stopped adding images from this site, but some archive stuff is still there. It should have auto deleted me from the index.


Step-by-step:

1. Create file in text editor and name in robots.txt
2. Cut and paste my file into yours
3. Upload file into your root directory (same directory as your home page)
4, You are done.

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Comments

I definitely like Razorskiss' entry better.

Posted by: Andrea at July 15, 2005 09:23 AM

Good advice. Much less extreme.

Posted by: Ron at July 15, 2005 08:59 PM

I would recommend to you to shut...

Posted by: Nicolegrants Kidman blog at July 29, 2005 10:01 PM

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