Facebook is giving parents a way to put their kids on the social network with a new Scrapbook feature that it began testing today. The feature lets parents create a tag for their young ones and include them in photos shared on their profile. Like the feature’s namesake, those photos are then put into a scrapbook that can be shared with their friends and friends of the partner who’s linked to them on Facebook.
The feature comes out of a survey Facebook ran of parents on its service. Of those who responded, 65 percent of them said that they tag their partners in photos of their child so that their partner’s friends can see the photos as well. With Scrapbook, users don’t have to resort to that tactic in order to share photos of their child.
Of course, the feature potentially opens kids up to future embarrassment. It’s one thing for parents to pepper their mantelpiece at home with photos of their kids, and another thing entirely for those photos to be available in a massive archive on the web. According to TechCrunch, Facebook hasn’t yet decided what to do with the photos once kids turn 13 and become eligible for their own accounts on the social network.
Scrapbook isn’t just for small human loved ones, either – there’s also an option for people to create one of the albums for their beloved pet. Overall, the feature is still in its early days. Facebook still has to figure out what happens when two people who share a Scrapbook split up, and the full privacy implications of the feature aren’t clear.
All of this organization does come with an added benefit: Facebook could use the tag to better adjust how frequently those items show up in a user’s News Feed. In other words, it means that people who are sick of seeing baby and puppy photos all the time may finally get the respite they desire.
