Readers regularly ask me if the picture of the baby in the header on this Web site (for you reading the blog’s RSS feed, the picture at www.thedaddydispatch.com), is baby L.

The answer, folks, is a resounding no, or to put it more eloquently: never-under-any-circumstances-not-even-if you-paid-me-or-threatened-to-declaw-my-eunuch-cat would I publish a picture of my daughter in a public or quasi-public forum.

It’s not that I’m trying to be contrarian. It’s not that I don’t want to share. I simply want to keep pictures of my kid private—at least for as long as I can call her a “kid.”

I recognize I’m in the minority on this one. I understand my opinions might seem a little wacky. Hell, I know many of you reading this have pictures of your kids on personal Web sites and Facebook. Maybe you think the people who have access to your social networking profile are people you can trust. If you’re savvy, you even manage permissions on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn as an attempt to control who sees what.

Still, after writing about technology for a decade, let me tell you: if you put the stuff online, anyone can find it if he or she looks hard enough.

Forget what sites promise about security—once you upload an image to some random server, there is no way to guarantee the safety of that image long-term. What’s more, even if access to these photos remains in seemingly trustworthy hands, there’s no way to guarantee that your friends and contacts will protect that access indefinitely, that they won’t (inadvertently, perhaps, at a coffee shop or a public computer terminal) let some stranger or would-be pedophile take a glance.

The bottom line: as information about our young ones increasingly becomes digital, we parents need to be more careful with how and where we share it.

I’m not here to judge people who publish pictures of their kids in quasi-public forums—if you do it, it’s your prerogative and therefore your choice. For me, however, pictures of L are staying on this hard drive; if I want you to see her, I’ll let you know.