Yes, I too was surprised about the amount of information on here exposing aspects of the life of a minor. If this thread had been started by a junior, we would have said right up front that they have posted way too much identifying information and anyone who wanted to creep them could easily find out who they were and where they live.
It’s one thing to start a FB page with total privacy parameters limited to family and real life friends, for family photos and baby pictures. But I notice that even the most ardent baby picture people tend to fade off as kids hit puberty and require more privacy.
There is no privacy on IG or YT unless you make the pages private.
It is very true that random small social media accounts can fly under the radar and be pretty harmless. But then you link to them on an international chat forum that has way more readers than members, identifying everything about your daughter her activities and her riding program. Now we are all following those accounts, even though you took the riding program YT link off here.
I get admiring your talented daughter, but what’s the end goal in keeping her off social media in her own right but starting an account that identifies her so clearly? Who is your target audience? Extended families? Her peers? Random pedophiles? What’s the point of making so much public?
I get the feeling you may be fairly naive with social media, which is fine. But here are a few guidelines we’ve all learned the hard way.
You can talk about anything as long as your online alter is water tight. In these cases you are judged only by the content of what you say.
Even if you have a water tight alter, keep your barn name out of your signature etc, any details you post can add up to identification for anyone that knows you.
Many people are members of COTH but never post, or have such a tight alter you don’t know who they are. And thousands more read COTH but aren’t members. It’s about the only active horse chat site outside of FB. It’s a key resource for technical questions. It’s pretty much a guarantee that someone from your own barn will stumble upon one of your totally anonymous posts, recognize you from tiny details in previous posts, and get offended.
It’s also possible that you will participate in a more raucous thread, where the topic or the OP turns out to be batsht crazy, and they will go through all your previous posts trying to work out who you are so they can phone you, your employer or trainer and scream and threaten. To my knowledge this happened with Nick Peronace, Susan Wackowich (Dressage Hub), Lauren Kanarek, and Kate Shearer (these people harassed anonymous COTH posters IRL or across other platforms after sleuthing their identities). This is called “doxxing.” It means finding out home address and personal details of someone online, and then either posting them or using them for harassment or crime. It didn’t happen to me because my alter and account are locked down, but there were stores from others!
It is also possible as in this case you are dragging in both a seller and a training program by using the registered name of the horse under discussion. I didn’t move fast enough to see the sales video but obviously others did, and it’s now public knowledge what you paid, where you bought him, and every last detail about his lameness issues.
Now the secret to staying safe is keep your alter water tight. Then you can ask any question without identifying both yourself, your child, and every single horse person you do business with. On an international horse chat forum.
I gather by the speed of your deletions here you’ve learned a fast lesson in internet protocol. Maybe a rather hard one.
I hope you have learned some lessons that will apply generally to your Internet life going forward. And to think about the ramifications of sharing so many identifying details of a teenage girl. You have no idea where and how those images will be shared and copied.
Read up on how pedophiles use “innocent” online posts if you want an eye opener.
Edited to add: I went back to Buoyant Dressage and saw that everything about Fine Dream had been deleted in the past couple of days. Did you request that or did they get spooked? Answer doesn’t matter really. I also noticed that as a YT channel they are very careful not to identify location or the identity of the junior riders, which is very good practice. And the channel name doesn’t link in search to a barn name website. They could be anywhere.
) to further their own learning. Not saying that in a bad way for them, but we had our different trainers along the road and we deferred to them as many do.
