Crime committed against children is never a laughing matter. It is something we should take all reasonable measures to prevent, investigate, and punish. That said, the paranoia stoked in parents by the media, particularly local news on slow news days, is occasionally hilarious. To me, anyway.

(Now is usually a good time to reiterate that I don’t have kids.)

A warning has been making the social media rounds over the past few days about the risk posed when a parent posts a smartphone picture of their child to the internet. Yes, pictures taken on your smartphone may have Exchangeable image file format (Exif) data that indicates the GPS position where the picture was taken, and yes, it is hypothetically possible that a person could access that data in order to locate your child. A good deconstruction of this paranoia appears on the website Daddy Doctrines (h/t Jennifer):

Here’s the fact you need to always keep in mind when these things come around: the chances of your child being abducted by a family member or someone close to the family is exponentially higher than the chances that some shadowy internet stalker somewhere is going to track down your child.

And if they did? If Shadowy Stalker did see a photo of my kid, and use his techno-powers to pull out the Exif data and determine my home address? How is that more of a threat than all the decades where one need only look in the phone book?

***

Ooh, ooh, but what about the park? The video said that this stuff is so precise that it even showed where in the park that little girl was playing! Uh-huh. And if Shadowy Stalker is somehow able to use his mad hacker skills to deduce that my son loves hanging out on the swings at our local park? Guess what? I am still right there with him.

Y’know… parenting!

This got me thinking about risks children might face that most parents, not to mention the people who make their livings keeping parents mortally afraid at all times, have not yet even considered. Here are my Five Things Parents Might Want to Be More Extremely Afraid Of Than Exif Data:

1. Teleportation technology. Your children will need to sleep in a lead-reinforced underground bunker, since teleportation waves work best at night. During daylight hours, particularly while at school, they’ll need to wear lead-shielded body armor and helmets. It won’t be possible to keep them entirely secure from satellite-based teleportation beams, but at least lead armor will ensure that pedophile kidnappers will only be able to teleport a child’s extremities. (This assumes, of course, that pedophiles have access to satellites. If they don’t, it’s really just a matter of time.) We should probably get to work on some stem cell research so the kids can regrow limbs they lose to pedophile kidnappers with access to satellite technology.

2. RFID tracking devices embedded in GMO food molecules. Because in Monsanto’s America, your food will hunt you!

3. Cell phone spy apps that covertly record your children’s phone conversations, Autotune them with a dubstep backbeat, and play them back on their parents’ phones right as they are about to fall asleep. The truly chilling part of all this, of course, is that your cell phone sees you when you’re sleeping.

4. Pedophiles who are also vampires. Sure, you can keep them out of your house by refusing to invite them in, but……well, actually, that sounds like a plan. Just keep the kids inside at all times. They might get bored, so be sure to invest in some board games, like Parcheesi.

5. Time-travelling kidnappers. What if kidnappers didn’t take kids to a hideout? What if they took them to…..THE FUTURE?????

Of course, all of this is satire. Time travel won’t be invented for at least another seventy years, and this era of human history will be considered too uncool to visit by then.