For many new parents, documenting your children’s milestones on social media is kind of expected these days: Pictures of the day they came home from the hospital, the day they smeared peas on their face, their first day of school – the list goes on.

But one mother has decided she doesn’t want any part of that and has vowed never to post anything about her daughter online -- ever. Instead, she’s created what she calls “a digital trust fund” for her daughter that she can unlock herself, when she’s ready.

Amy Webb is a digital strategist who says she always worried when she saw friends and family posting so much information about their children online. While the photos were often cute, Webb worried the images and content could also be misused if they were ever to fall into the wrong hands.

What really clinched it for Webb was when Facebook changed its terms of service so that the faces of friends or other users could be redirected into ads on the site.

“That had me concerned about the future privacy, not just of the stuff that I was posting, but of what I was seeing,” Webb told CTV’s Canada AM Friday, speaking from Baltimore.

“This body of digital content will hamper the ability of these kids to be anonymous in the future, and that really had me thinking.”

Webb says she appreciates why parents love posting about their children online.

“As parents, we are proud of our children and we want to post these photos and see the feedback. So I totally understand why people post the content,” she says.

But through her work in digital strategy, Webb says she knows what’s coming and it worries her. What she sees is facial recognition technology, which is already becoming commonplace. Social sites such as Facebook are now using that technology and creating algorithms that can “learn” to identify faces and assemble profiles about them. Webb worries about how all that parent-generated content is going to affect children.

In a column Webb wrote for Slate earlier this month, she said she’s concerned that some of these seemingly innocuous postings by parents could haunt their children for years to come.

“It’s hard enough to get through puberty. Why make hundreds of embarrassing, searchable photos freely available to her prospective homecoming dates?” she wrote.

Many greeted Webb’s column with skepticism, insisting that having a presence online is simply the norm these days before accusing her of paranoia. But Webb doesn’t see it that way.

“From my point of view, this isn’t about being paranoid,” she said.

“We’re heading into a future in which everybody is a public person; we are all in the public spotlight. And it’s going to be increasingly difficult for anyone to be anonymous in the future. So my husband and I wanted to give our daughter the gift of anonymity -- of being able to grow up without a legacy of digital content that wasn’t already attached to her, and to give her a sort of digital trust fund that she could unlock in the future.”

To create that “trust fund,” Webb and her husband began by selecting their daughter’s name very carefully. They narrowed down three name choices, then checked whether any of those names were linked to criminals or other tainted digital legacies that could possibly be mixed up with their daughter.

They then created an email account with their daughter’s name and spent several hours registering her for a vast array of social media sites, as well as for her own personal website. No content has been posted to any of the sites. The plan now is that when they decide their daughter is ready, they will give her the password to that email account, which will act as the “access key” to all the other sites.

Webb says the steps she and her husband have taken are not about restricting their daughter from doing anything digital until she’s 18.

“She’s got an iPad; she’s fully connected,” Webb says. “This is about us posting content on her behalf.”

What Webb says she’s giving her daughter is the ability to forge her own digital legacy. By never having had any embarrassing photos or information posted about her online, their daughter can start with a clean slate and begin creating her own digital footprint, the way she would like.

“It’s allowing her to post when she’s ready and when we’re ready for her to do that,” Webb says. “Rather than us posting about her day to day – when she eats, pees, takes a bath – that sort of thing.”