Online Photos Not as Private As District Mother Assumed

[RamboLiberal]

Source: Washington Post

Be careful what photographs you post online.

About four months ago Meredith Massey uploaded three pictures of her children skinny-dipping, along with more than 50 other photos, to the online photo site Flickr. She marked those untitled and unclothed pictures "private" for her parents' eyes only. But a couple of weeks ago, the District woman discovered the selected snapshots had been viewed thousands of times, while other photos had about 20 hits. She immediately removed the pictures and contacted Flickr.

"Are creepy people searching through thousands of pictures looking for random naked ones?" Massey said, baffled at how viewers got around the privacy settings. "I don't know."

Flickr spokeswoman Terrell Karlsten said the company was working with Massey to figure out what went wrong.



Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/20/AR2008022002746.html?hpid=topnews

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Uh, lady you might be lucky if the police are not knocking at the doors. I remember some stories back before digital photography where drug store clerks and photo techs were getting parents arrested for innocent nude photos of their kids.

If you want to keep photos private, never, ever post them on a website!

[patrice]

1. If you can't arrange things such as having millions of emails disappear, DON'T do anything

"private" on the internet.

[Karenina]

17. THE INTERNET IS PUBLIC DOMAIN

Or, THE INTERNETS ARE PUBLIC DOMAIN, so far... :scared:

What about that is not to get? :eyes:

[kirby]

18. No its not...

Copyright applies to information you post on the Internet. Everything posted is not public domain... Where did you get that idea from?

[DeSwiss]

20. It applies....

...if you've copyrighted it. Right now the law isn't always clear as to just what's private and what isn't when it appears on the nets, unless its been posted w/o someone else's permission, or when it has been registered with the copyright office.

The account she has is indeed a private one, but it is also the type of account that is accessible to anyone. That might be analogous to placing the pictures in her living room window for public viewing. Its still in her house, but everyone can still see them.

Which is the whole point for Flckr offering free space to store them because people come by to look. And from those clicks they can sell ads. An account with Kodak and similar type services, would allow her to share photos with only those she allows access.

IMHO

DeSwiss

[Karenina]

24. You obviously did NOT grok my comment.

[kirby]

26. Enlighten me...

There was not much detail in your comment other than an assertion that everything on the Internets is public domain.

[Frank Cannon]

28. I think what Karenina was aiming at...

is that if you wouldn't put it on the Jumbotron in front of a sold-out crowd at the Superdome, don't put it on the Internet.

[Karenina]

31. I don't mean public domain in a legal sense.

Prolly should have used quotation marks, my bad. What I mean is, once send is clicked, it's like words tumbling out of one's mouth.
You can't take 'em back.

[kirby]

32. Oh okay...

In other words don't put stuff out on the internet that you would not want others to see. However in this case, the article says the mother used a password protected private feature of Flickr (assuming there is one, I havent used it). In that case, there is probably a reasonable expectation of privacy against the general public viewing the photos. Personally, the whole social networking thing scares me. It is creating a generation of younger folks that do not understand or respect privacy.

[Karenina]

33. I'll take it one step further...

Passwords, encryption, firewalls notwithstanding, ANY information once it has been sent is available to ANYONE who has the skills and motivation to retrieve it. An expectation of "privacy" is unrealistic.

[kirby]

34. I completely disagree with you...

I believe there is an expectation of privacy, especially if you encrypt something. Your viewpoint renders the entire legal history of privacy as irrelevant. Your interpretation means that anyone can listen in to your phone conversation since you 'put the information out there'. Obviously the FBI has the skills and motivation to retrieve that info. I could stand outside your house with a special microphone and tape your bedroom 'conversations' and by your logic it would be unrealistic to expect that was private.

What is so troubling about your mindset and others like you is that the very definition about what is a 'reasonable expectation' is being diminished because people like you are lowering their expectations. It is a self fulfilling prophecy.

[Karenina]

36. Oh PSHAW, Kind.

Stasi used hard copy. Why SHOULD ANYONE expect all these bits and bytes to be immune to interception by anyone who has the means and motive to do so??? Just asking. :shrug:

[patrice]

27. Spectrum is Licensed by the Public, through it's government.

Broadcasting media licenses are sold by the government for cheap, compared to the money the media makes off of them.

[samdogmom]

2. Isn't this how the abuses at Abu Ghraib were first discovered?

Someone posted the pictures on one of these photo-sharing websites. Probably a good rule of thumb is to only post things you won't mind seeing in the public domain.

[Tikki]

3. I'm confused. If she had no plans to share with anyone...

but her parents why put them on Flikr?!! Wouldn't the mom just down load them
to her computer and email them to the grandparents!!


Tikki

[DaveJ]

11. Keeping photos online is a good backup

Hard drives will all fail eventually, and even if one back stuff up to DVD, those can get lost or burned in a fire. Plus it's cool to be able to bring up your photos no matter where in the world you are.

[daleo]

22. What if the online company goes out of business?

If it is really important, I would make a print on good quality paper.

[DaveJ]

30. Like post mortem circumstances?

When I die or society collapses it will be a good idea to have a hard copy for those really important photos. That is, if mankind is unable to harness the limitless supply of energy that exists in the universe. I think that otherwise, there will be online services of some kind.

I selfishly don't really care what happens to my photos after that point. But that's my problem I suppose. If I'm feeling energetic some day, maybe I'll create a time capsule to store my important stuff.

[daleo]

37. I was just thinking of a particular company going out of business

But a time capsule is never a bad idea...

[Radio_Lady]

4. I took some cute pictures of my granddaughter when she was 3 years old.

Recently, I thought about putting them up at Webshots or Photobucket. That would have been a disaster. No way.

In peace,

Radio Lady

[ailsagirl]

6. Smart. You never know

[Radio_Lady]

16. Yes, my daughter and her children are high on my list of people to protect.

[ailsagirl]

5. I thought the article would say that the woman was arrested or

something.

I'm glad that didn't happen.

[0007]

7. ....or the do gooders have taken her children a way and put them in

a nice Christian Home.

[ailsagirl]

35. Really. Nothing (really) surprises me anymore... not since 2000

when we were thrust into this dark, surrealistic world.

:hide:

[baldguy]

8. People who don't trust the govt to change a lightbulb

will always trust a corporation with their lives & well being.

[YDogg]

9. good point

[pitohui]

10. i don't understand why she wasn't arrested

er, nude pictures of minors, check, posted on internet to share with somebody else, check

it doesn't suddenly become "not" child pornography when it's your child or when the sharing is with your parents -- hell the incest thing actually makes it creepier because, guess what, it's still nude photos of minor children and they're still actual human beings with feelings, not just a parent or grandparent's property

if anyone still thinks that taking nude pictures of kids when they're too young to understand or to say no is still "cute," they need to wake up, these photos have probably been whanked to by sickos all over the world -- and one day the kids are gonna find out about it and have an awfully sick feeling

great going, mom! sure, flickr screwed up but they couldn't have screwed up if she hadn't taken nude photos of minor children and put them online to begin with

sheesh

i never understood parents who thought it was cute to humiliate their kids with nude photos, never have, never will, i guess

same sort of parent who thinks it's cute to tickle kids until they cry or vomit, i guess

[DaveJ]

12. What exactly is the age window?

I assume the naked baby in bathtub, or naked babys bottom, pictures are okay right? Plus, it's my guess video and photos of naked kids are taken in African villages where nudity is accepted. So I think the main point is the intended use of the photos.

[Xithras]

13. Nudity is not pornography.

Pornography requires a sexual element, or a suggestive pose. While there have been cases where people have been convicted of posting non-suggestive nude photo's, there are just as many where the judges have appropriately tossed the cases. To qualify as child porn, the photo must contain an image of a nude or semi-nude child in a pose or setting that any reasonable person would consider sexually suggestive or titillating.

Your typical bathtub photo doesn't qualify, and most skinny dipping photos wouldn't either if they actually just depicted kids playing in the water.

Many parents aren't hung up on nudity, and don't automatically equate nudity with sexuality. The idea with taking photos (and I take many hundreds every year, so I'm speaking from experience) isn't necessarily to share them, but to remember them yourself later. I would barely remember what my teenage daughter looked like as a toddler if I didn't have photos. Skinny dipping in a river was probably simply a fun activity the parents wanted to remember later.

Didn't you ever go skinny dipping as a kid? There's nothing sexual about having mud in your buttcrack :)

[arikara]

23. Or baby crabs biting your little arse

My parents still laugh about me being nipped in the butt by little crabs when I was put in the sand to play with a bucket and shovel.

Wouldn't sharing that photo qualify as perverse?

[izquierdista]

14. Puritanism strikes again!

Only in the USA is nudity = depraved sexuality of the worst kind.


On edit: well, maybe Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, other repressed religious nutcases.....

[mainegreen]

15. Here:

Now I'm off to make my kid vomit!

:sarcasm:

[Solon]

38. you are nuts...

that is all.

[Barb in Atl]

19. I'm more interested in...

...how someone can access photos online. I use shutterfly and have to log in to access and send pics or cards out. Are you telling me that ANYBODY can get access to those pics? Or is it the two sites mentioned up thread don't require logging in?

(and nah, my baby in the tub picture days are done. He's 8 and won't even let me kiss him in the classroom anymore. I remember when I would have to peel him off me when I came to pick him up from school. sigh)

[pimpbot]

21. It is quite easy to bypass the "security" most of the online photo hosters

I've heard of sites that post the contents of a photobucket that users request to be "opened". I wouldn't trust the site's security unless I was the one running it and had logs of who was accessing what files.

[Xithras]

29. Usually it's poor site design.

A common setup is something like this: You upload a photo to the site, and it goes into a folder where it can be accessed by anyone with the address. When you stop sharing them, the site simply stops displaying it in the webpages or forces a viewer to log in before allowing it to be displayed on a webpage. The problem with this model is that it's security through obfuscation...the image is still located in a publically accessible spot, it's just no longer linked publicly in the theory that if nobody can find it, it's not really shared. If someone has the EXACT filename and path for the file, they can still access it directly though.

The model fails simply because sites like Flickr don't assign random names to the file, but have a naming schema that can be predicted by those familiar with the system. That makes it possible to "wardial" a list of probable names and view all of the images in someones folder whether it's shared or not.

The only way around this is to physically encrypt the images on the server, or to relocate them to non-public servers when they're not shared. That gets incredibly complex to set up, so none of the photo sites bother.

If the site uses a truly random hash for the file name, you're stuff is probably secure enough that you don't need to worry about it. It's still possible for someone to get at your images, but they'd have to troll through literally trillions of potential filename combinations to get it. This is the model I use on my own photo server.

[DiverDave]

25. Before digital, I worked in a photo lab

We did thousands of rolls a night, and we would never call the cops for innocent kids pictures.
That said, we DID contact them if any kids were getting hurt.

And yes we did get a couple, the people were arrested.