Friday, May 21, 2010

Who Owns The Photos!?

You know you are addicting to blogging, when you prefer to discuss problems between you and your friends via blog posts, instead of discussing them face to face.



Isn't it ironic when you receive a couple of SMSs and more than one Email form one of your friends asking you in a very rude way to delete some of the photos you've uploaded to your Facebook account because he/she happens to appear in them, and he/she considers it a big violation to his/her privacy, and then you find out that there are dozens of photos out there uploaded by different people with him/her in them, and it gets really creepier when he/she starts tagging himself/herself in even more photos!? Isn't it ironic that when I were in Chile last week, many strangers in the streets there had no problem with me photographing them, and some others even urged me to shoot them, and then a friend - I still insist on calling him/her a friend anyway even thought we almost stopped talking to each other - is mad at you because he/she happens to appear in some of the photos you are publishing!? Isn't it ironic that his/her privacy becomes really important, when you are the one who uploads the photos, and he/she starts yelling at you, however his/her privacy doesn't seem to be that important when other strangers are uploading similar photos!?

Ah, before I end this post, I'd like to say that the main reason for me writing this post, is that I was wondering about who owns a specific photo. Is it the one who shoots it, uploads it, or the one who appears in it? People are discussing Facebook privacy issues thoroughly nowadays, and in fact I believe the whole privacy issue is out of our control now. Everyone out there happens to have a cell phone with a built in camera, and most of them happen to have accounts on Facebook, Flickr, Twitpic, you name it. So would you please tell me, what is the point of making your photos private on Facebook in order for people not to know how you look like? Yeah, sometimes you might consider some photos embarrassing and then you might not like the idea of sharing them publicly, but this is a different issue, as I am mainly talking here about those who freak out and have problems with their real identity (How they look like? Where they are/were? Who are their friends?) being disclosed. Would you please tell me how are you going complete strangers not to upload photos with you in them? And even if you can technically prevent them from tagging you in those photos, they still can just write your name underneath the photo!

1 comment:

Gabriela said...

You raise really interesting questions here. I consider social networks as showcases where we expose ourselves. So, that's why I'm not in Facebook, although I a aware I may appear in some photos.
Saludos.