Top Baby Blogs reset their rankings this morning. Your votes have kept me at #4 over the last few months; thank you so much! Normally I would post a super cute photo of the girls asking for you to please continue voting for me, but I'm not so sure this time.
Why? On Friday night, a reader brought to my attention that there was a "Melissa" on Facebook (update: it's gone) displaying about 50 photos of Carina, myself, and Mike as her own. Her photo albums:
It gets weirder. If you look at this person's friends list, they are all other fake profiles containing stolen bloggers' photos. Here's where Top Baby Blogs comes in; all of the bloggers are or were on the front page of TBB.
And then it becomes CREEPY. There were other pages, too, one of which showed Carina's photo (as well as photos of other TBB bloggers' kids) right underneath a bunch of photos of murdered children. This is what really freaked me out. The page has since been taken down, but all of the fake profiles have been reported multiple times and so far Facebook hasn't done anything about it. One of the other affected bloggers is in the process of figuring out who is doing this. I'm in contact with her and will keep you updated.
Top Baby Blogs has been great for me and my little ol' blog. I have met a number of nice bloggers and it brings me a lot of traffic. But, if being listed on there is going to send crazies my way? No thanks. The hits just aren't important enough to me. What do you think? If you were me, would you remove it?
I know, I know, I've already had a whole slew of people tell me that I should accept that this sort of thing will happen when I put my life out there on the internet. I am well aware. But that doesn't mean I can't take steps to hopefully prevent it from happening again. So, I need to get some things in order...download a watermarking program, and contemplate how much I want to share from here on out. Any other suggestions on how to avoid stolen photos or creepers?
Yuck. The internet can be a messed up place.
