Bubba Facebook Update: Bubs Accepted Our Friend Request!

We mentioned in our last post that we had requested Bubba Waring, of fetal Facebook fame, to be our friend on the social networking site. We are excited to report that he confirmed our friendship:

Australia-based Bubs has less than 100 friends on Facebook. We feel honored to be among them, but are surprised that (1) the 1-year-old Bubs already has 95 friends and (2) that he (or more likely, his mom) accepted a friend request from a random 20-something American lady. We can now see photos, status updates, and even his phone number. It's like being invited into the family's virtual living room.

We are happy to see a status update from Bubs that indicates he is recovering from a cold. We're contemplating writing on his wall to say so...

The Little Ones Get Little Privacy

It's hard to find anywhere truly private these days. Even the womb is subject to prying eyes. According to Ubergizmo, 57,000 babies in the UK have their own social networking sites. Parents set up profiles for their children while they are still fetuses in some cases, setting ultrasonic images as their profile pics and updating their statuses as appropriate, e.g., Baby Bubba is kicking.

An Australian couple was one of the first to put their fetus, Bubba Waring, on Facebook back in 2007 and got lots of news coverage.

The idea of having your whole life played out on Facebook strikes me as incredibly creepy. I checked Facebook to see what Bubba Waring is up to these days. The profile for "Bubs Waring" is now set to private so I couldn't take a close look at it, but the child in the profile photo looks about 2. He's carrying a red ball. Very cute. I requested to "add as friend."

World Net Daily brings us another more recent privacy issue for the little ones. The privacy of their DNA is not getting the respect it deserves in Minnesota:

Nine families have filed a lawsuit against Minnesota's health department over its practice of collecting DNA from newborns and then keeping and using the private information...

Agency spokesman John Stine said the lawsuit was being reviewed, but he confirmed the department takes the blood samples from about 70,000 infants annually, and unless the parents specifically choose to opt out of the program, their children's DNA is saved...

The case alleges "as of December 31, 2008, Defendant Minnesota Department of Health had stored 819,282 dried blood spot baby samples; had stored 1,567,133 records of the results of newborn genetic screening; and had used 52,519 dried blood spot samples for research."

Our notions of privacy are changing all the time. There is certainly much that is generational and cultural. But if kids today are born to ready-made social networking profiles and their DNA on file, it seems like expectations for some kinds of privacy will be almost nonexistent.

Unborn Have Their Own Social Networking Page [Ubergizmo]
Parents sue state over babies' DNA [World Net Daily]