I like my flickr account, I like that I can purge my photos there of our daily life and share them, it creates a cool slide show on my blog, it was huge in helping create my books for the twins and I in turn enjoy looking at others photos on flickr and have often been inspired but a couple of weeks ago I received a message from another flickr member about how much they loved my daughter and she is the most beautiful girl they had ever seen. Now if that is where it had ended I might of been flattered but they went on to talk about how much joy they got from looking at her photos and no one will ever understand how happy they were when I upload new photos and was wondering if they could use her photos for their pleasure. And they ended with saying who knows maybe one day they hope to call her their daughter. I was beyond creeped out, it made me start to seriously think about how many other creeps are out there looking at or using photos of my children. I did some research and photos that I put in flickr will come up when you do searches on yahoo or google in the images. So any one in the world with internet can get to my photos. Of course their are options of making my photos private but then for friends and family to view them they would need to create or be logged into a flickr account. So I am battling with just deleting the account all together.
I thought I could delete my flickr account and just use facebook more because there I can mark the photos so only friends of mine can view the photos. But of course there are loop holes there and I even found people who are posting tips and tricks for how to view hidden or private images on facebook. And then last week my mom called me and told me she found a facebook profile of a girl in Dubai using a photo that I took of the twins as her facebook profile. I was furious and sent her a message to immediately remove the image which she didn't so I am in the process of reporting the image as violating the copyright law and having facebook delete it form her account.
So for the past couple of weeks this has been weighing on me. How much is too much? Should I delete my flickr account or am I being too sensitive? Should I limit the photos I post to flickr, facebook and even my blog or maybe just stop posting pictures all together? I also learned that photos you upload to blogger are uploaded to a photo sharing source called Picasa and people in the Picasa community can browse your photos unless you go in and set them to be unlisted. Please let me know your opinions.
Sorry I just had to get that out there. On a lighter note the twins are turning 2 in 9 days! I have been so busy I just barely finished their invitations and will put them in the mail tomorrow!
I have have several friends that have set their blog to private(by invitation only), and I'm debating on doing that as well. I also have a friend whose husband works as a police officer, and has told some crazy stories about people and how they use pictures they find on the internet via social networking. I just don't think like that or have that mentality, so it makes me mad that the weirdos out there take such good things and make them bad. It's just sad.
ReplyDeleteAnd thanks on the tip about picasa albums. I didn't know that.
Love the birthday invite:-)