The plan

So I don't know if this is really a "solution" to the problem, but I have decided what I'm going to do going forward: at some point in the near-ish future, this blog will be deleted. I have already printed out the content from 2007-2014 into books anyway, so I have what I need. I'm not happy about deleting it, but the risk of all those years of pictures of my children being out there in internet outer space for creepy strangers to steal isn't worth it - it has obviously happened (at least) once, so it's too likely it could happen again.

However, I'm not ready to stop blogging, so from now on you can find me rambling over here. (Click on the hyperlink to be directed to my new blog, or you can manually type in theblogivers{dot}wordpress{dot}com into your search bar and be directed that way if you'd prefer.) I am keeping the new blog public for now, but I chose to move to WordPress in case I decide to go private in the future, because a friend clued me in that WordPress does not limit the number of private readers you can have, unlike Blogger. 

You will also notice a slightly annoying little watermark on most of my pictures from here on out as my first line of defense in an effort to keep low-lifes from stealing them. May or may not work, but I consider it worth the effort for now.

So farewell, this little blog of mine. We had a good run, but it's on to the next (hopefully much safer) adventure! 

Digitally kidnapped

On Thursday evening after we had finished dinner, Wade headed upstairs with the kids to play so I could have some peace and quiet. I sat down on the couch, opened my lap top, and began doing the usual mindless internet surfing that I usually do. In the midst of my facebook perusing, I noticed I had an email from someone I didn't know - I could tell it wasn't spam, so I opened it and began reading... then my heart sunk.

It was a woman who said she had found my blog in an unusual way. She then explained that she and her husband were currently pursuing private adoption here in the United States, and in the process of reaching out to potential birth moms, she came across someone's "story" and photos that just didn't seem right. The person had responded to a craigslist posting of theirs and claimed to have a 10-month-old son who she was no longer fit to care for various reasons, and then she attached pictures of her son to the email. Acting on the advice of an adoption scam group, the woman who reached out to me decided to do a reverse google image search (yes, it's a real thing, I tried it myself) of the photos, and that led her to my blog. The pictures this individual sent her were pictures of MY son when he was 10 months old. Pictures taken from MY blog.

The individual went so far as to give the photos new file names with Davis's name. For example, if one of the images I uploaded was titled "DSC_1234," this person changed the file name to something like "Davis 7.") This means they were not just stealing photos from my blog, but also stealing information from the blog and passing it off as their own - all in an attempt to pull at the heartstrings of hopeful adoptive parents in order to scam money out of them. And from the sound of the person's email, as well as the way they saved and numbered the photos, it doesn't seem like this was their first attempt to do this.

My head was spinning when I read the email. What needed to be done?, I wondered. Could anything be done? I have heard about this kind of thing happening, and I have also heard that there is very little you can do to stop it. Honestly, I knew that by having a public blog and sharing photos of my children, I was at risk of this sort of thing. While it really makes me feel ill to know that pictures of MY child are being used in this awful, deceitful way, I feel worse for the people who might be falling for this scam and giving them their money. It just makes me angry in a thousand different ways.

It also makes me feel so helpless. I ended up reporting the incident as an internet crime complaint to the FBI online last night, but I am getting the impression from many that mine is just one in a very large pile of complaints and nothing may ever come of it. All I have to go off of is an email address with a presumably fake name for a person in another country. While I am incredibly grateful that I have no reason to feel my child is actually in danger, I hate that I can't just erase all traces of these photos from the internet and remove them from the hands of the horrible person who has them. I feel like I let my child down in a way, and that's an incredibly awful feeling.

I still don't really know what to do from here. I have reverted the large majority of my old blog posts to drafts for the time being, and I plan to watermark photos on the blog going forward, but it just doesn't feel like enough at the moment. I just want to do SOMETHING to right this wrong. Do I make the blog private? Do I stop blogging altogether? Do I just think a lot harder about what I'm going to share from now on and hope for the best? I don't want to live in fear, but I also don't want to do anything that will make me feel this violated ever again...

Anyway, forgive the unedited stream of consciousness, but I just feel so uncomfortable at the moment and I needed to get it out there. And on the off chance the piece of trash terrible human being waste of space individual might be reading this post, since they seem so familiar with my blog, perhaps they will get the message that what they are doing is so, so wrong on so many levels. Doubtful, but worth a shot.