essays

Cathartic Ink

putting my own spin on things

The Dangers of Public Photos.

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This morning I logged into Flickr to see if I had any new comments on my photos. My most recent comment was from another kind Flickr member telling me that the photos I had posted of myself in my wedding dress were being linked to in a gallery on a German corset-fetishist website. I had innocently tagged the dress with the tag “corset” and the website was pulling any public photo tagged with that word into a gallery on their site. So, for the first time ever I have had to make some of my photos private which means that as it stands right now my mother, father and at least one of my sisters who do not have flickr accounts would not be able to see them. I know flickr is free and they could get an account easily but that’s not the point. The point is that while I have put the photos there for the entire world to see, I did not put the photos there for the world to take and use for their own [dirty or otherwise] purposes. And it grosses me out to know that the photos of my wedding dress have been used so.

I know that this is all because I made the choice to make all of my photos public. I take responsibility for my actions. I know that I don’t have to use Flickr if I don’t want people to steal, abuse or otherwise mangle my personal photos because I understand that there is virtually no way to keep people who really want them from getting them. But it grieves me none-the-less that this is the world that we are living in.

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