This is a first:Has anyone ever asked you to take down a photo that you shared on Flickr, Facebook or Twitter? Well, if they haven't- your time is coming. It happened to me last weekend.
This person was upset that I had shared some photos with my Facebook friends that were taken at her wedding- many of whom also were at the wedding (who subsequently also shared wedding photos). She was not a Facebook member or into social networking, and she was upset that so many folks had not seen the "official" photos, which her photographer took, and that she had built her own website for. Oops.
Automatically I thought: are we not but a mere few steps from infringing on someone's privacy rights? It must be simply a matter of time.
As for Facebook, I am now in the "scanning phase" as a user, where old schoolmates I hardly remember are beginning to scan old photos of 8 year old birthday parties I attended (as a child) and have "tagged" me in them. Now, I've always been a pretty loose person on this type of stuff ( i.e. I'm not very private), to be truthful. But when is it too much, and when will it go too far?
Could Creative Commons Hurt Children?
I was recently pointed to Alec Couros's blog about his surprise when he found some not-so-upstanding Flickr followers tongue-wagging over photos of his young daughter. I, myself, have a daughter, and, although I do a pretty good job of making our Youtube videos private and not putting any "provocative" types of pictures out there, I think it's fair to say that Flickr, Youtube (owned by Google) and Facebook are on the precipice of some new privacy litigation either brought on by class-action lawsuits, or by some high profile victim (remember the Hillary Clinton cardboard cut-out breast-grab? She laughed it off, but could someone else?).
It begs a question of Creative Commons. If you allow people to share, mash-up and use your photos, could a knucklehead exploit your child because you put a Creative Commons license on it? Are you giving some perverts permission to do some inappropriate mash-ups? Shouldn't the actual children have rights over their image, if those postings might damage their future careers or their livelihoods? I'm pretty sure child stars have these rights written into their Hollywood contracts, but what about the average kid? Remember the "Star Wars Kid?"
It's still unclear how the video of the Star Wars Kid will have aided or impeded the development of that child. What if this was your kid, and the entire world mashed it up and shared it? What if you allowed it by sharing it under Creative Commons? One might say that Creative Commons doesn't hurt people; people hurt people. If it was Copyrighted, then I suppose you'd have grounds to sue.
There are a lot of questions here that I am not qualified to answer here when it comes to Creative Commons, fair use, privacy, and I hope that those people in the know will chime in on this conversation. Where are we headed?
A Brave New Photo-sharing World
Will we have to sign a waiver before entering an establishment stating that we won't snap pictures of unwitting people? Will we have to sign waivers or confidentiality agreements at our kid's birthday parties? Will cell phone companies and Google, Facebook, Flickr, and others be held responsible for hosting any of these photos, if they are found to seriously hurt someone? And what about RSS? Could Blogger be held responsible for RSS feeds posted on someone's blog with inappropriate Flickr streams? Where does the information start, and where does it end? While I know that most of these companies have user policies that put much of the responsibility with the end user, by offering the tool, certainly someone with a strong enough case could hold these companies responsible at some point.
We could be headed for a litigious nightmare, where we might lose many of these wonderful tools that we love. Or maybe we are going an all-together different route- as the definition of privacy as we've known it- changes in this public world.
