Proud parents flood Facebook newsfeeds with pictures of their cute babies, but the children have no say in what photos get posted. A new crib mobile puts baby in charge of the selfie.
Dutch designer Laura Cornet created "New Born Fame," a toy that allows babies to take selfies and post them to social media, according to CNN. When the baby reaches out for the soft toys shaped as the Facebook and Twitter logos, the mobile takes a photo or video and automatically posts it to a social network.
"It's weird to be involved in the life of someone who doesn't even know I have already seen everything in their life," Cornet told CNN about the amount of newborns with their photos splashed across social media. "But the babies didn't agree to having their photos put up online."
Cornet had no intention of commercializing the device. The mobile was her graduation project at the department of Man + Communication at Eindhoven Design Academy and she only wanted to spark a debate about "who has the right to post pictures of infants online," according to CNN.
She is redesigning her original prototype so that the photos taken by the babies are sent to their parents mobile devices first, before they're posted online. Cornet remains hesitant on putting the selfie-taking mobile above the crib of any children she may have in the future.
"I don't know. When you have kids yourself, things change. Suddenly babies become cute -- so I can't guarantee that I wouldn't do it myself," she said.
Most mothers who post their baby photos to Facebook were the first to adopt to the social network, usually in college, according to a study by Microsoft Research. Almost two-thirds (62 percent) of mothers with children under three use Facebook, and 96 percent of them have posted photos of their child to their page.
