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Name: Paul Hyland
Location: Silver Spring, Maryland, United States

I'm the executive producer for the web site of a nonprofit publisher of education news, information, and resources, I play in a band, and I work on analyzing and influencing the impact of computers on society. I love my partner in life and my daughter very much.

My Daughter

three friends
She hangs w/ her peeps
Old Pictures | More Recent
Videos:
She Walks @ 1 (9.6MB)
She Drums @ 2 (2.6MB)


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Paul's Web Space 2.1

Politics, Culture, Technology

Stories about cool events I've attended, musings about social media and other technology, and commentary about people, issues, ideas, whatever. I've had a web site since 1994, at my own domain since 1997, and switched it to blog format in 2005. Now, in 2008, I've added labels, shuffled things around a bit and fixed some style and UI quirks - hence 2.1. Watch for more widgets and microformats....
Sunday, January 06, 2008

'Net Privacy for Children; 4-year-old Fashionistas!

As I blog about my daughter, I'm suddenly thinking I shouldn't blog or tweet, etc. kids' names...so I'm going to stop naming any children in any of my public writing. Not that it will make a huge deal by itself, it's mostly the policy that's supposed to mean something. I'm a privacy advocate who lives my life on the 'net pretty much as an open book, both for professional reasons, and due to cynicism on my part regarding the privacy protections that remain (in tatters). However, I don't need to drag anyone else, especially kids, along with me into my public life on the web.

Henceforth, you'll more posts looking like this:

My daughter told me a story about her preschool class yesterday that I found surprising, and very funny. I don't know what we were talking about, but fairly unprompted, I found out that she suddenly wasn't the biggest fan of pink. Now to me, this was NEWS, so I explored the back-story behind this development, and discovered the following (pay attention if you want to stay abreast of the most avant garde fashion trends).

All of the girls in my daughter's class but two have left pink behind as last year's color; the current hot color among 4-year-old girls is purple. Likewise, for all the boys but two, black is the new brown. The exact wording was something like this (from a 4-year-old):
I used to like pink, but I don't any more. All of the girls, except for xxx and xxx, say pink is old, it's from last year. All the boys now like black except xxx and xxx; they still like brown, but all the other boys say brown is from last year.
From the mouths of babes...I mean the next generation of fashionistas.

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