Baby's first profile pic? Facebook's new 'Scrapbook' lets parents give kids a digital presence
Up until yesterday, it was virtually impossible to tag a child under the age of 13 in a Facebook photo — unless, of course, that child had lied about his or her age in order to create a profile.
The social network is unlikely to relax its strict underage members policy any time soon, but a new tool designed to help parents better organize family photos is now giving children Facebook identities of their own. Sort of.
Launched in the U.S. yesterday, Facebook's "Scrapbook" feature is described by the company in a news release as "an optional way for you to organize photos of your child, using a special tag you choose to create."
Facebook suggests using a child's name, initials or "something fun" for the tag, which can be added to every existing or future photo of that child uploaded to the network.
"If you choose to tag your child in a photo it will be added to a customisable scrapbook," reads Facebook's release. "And, photos you choose to tag can be shared with your friends and your partner's friends."
Only the person who creates a scrapbook can tag photos of the child it was created for, unless he or she designates "a partner who you're in a relationship with on Facebook" as its co-owner.
Facebook writes little in the post of how public or private these scrapbooks will be aside from noting that they can be shared with a user's friends and his or her partner's friends.
Facebook Product Manager Dan Barak, who spearheaded the Scrapbook project, recently created a scrapbook for his own son, Rom.
Looking not at all unlike an actual Facebook profile, little Rom's scrapbook contains a profile picture and a cover photo just like his dad's.
"Any photo Rom is tagged in will appear in his scrapbook," reads a block of text under the scrapbook's header. "The scrapbook doesn't have its own privacy setting, but the photos in it do."
Because Barak has adjusted his Facebook privacy settings so that only his friends can see most of his photos, only two photos of Rom could be viewed in the scrapbook when logged into the network as CBCNews.
Scrapbooks created by users with less restrictive settings, on the other hand, could potentially be visible to anyone in the world.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Barak indicated that Facebook may one day let parents hand control of these scrapbooks over to their children when they turn 13.
"Everyone who's on Facebook should control their own identity," he said. "If they want to remove it they can, or they can make it more public."
He also noted that Facebook could potentially use Scrapbook tags to identify photos with kids in them, and then hide those photos from users who've shown no interest in this type of material.
To urban 20-somethings from small towns who have a lot of infant-obsessed high school classmates on their "friends list," this may be the product's most appealing feature.
