99% of the pictures of my daughter I post are made only visible to family and friends. People tell me I am paranoid but stuff like this keeps happening and it can only happen so often before I think “why take the risk?”
Wayne at Utata
All of my pictures are private now, because someone with multiple accounts at livejournal and myspace has been using them to construct weblogs in which my children are characters in a fantasy family.
Some strange person has taken his family photographs and used them as her own, constructing a fantasy family life and casting Wayne as her husband. Seriously.
I used to blog and post pictures about my family all the time until I started getting .. inappropriate .. comments made. Nothing too scary or threatening but some people got a little to familiar.
Darren Rouse, a popular blogger, had a stalker turn up at his house and make threats. Consider Flickrs new mapping feature, how easy are we making it for freaks to track us down?
It seems to me it is just not safe to make your private life too public. Sure post pictures and blog, but draw the line somewhere. The internet has a long memory and stuff is so easily copied, re-mixed, manipulated and re-posted. It is no good wishing in the future you hadn’t divulged stuff, then it is too late. You can take stuff down but you can’t delete from peoples hard disks.
People say to me “I have been blogging for years and nothing like this has ever happened to me”. I hope for your sake it never does but your past experience is no guarantee of what will happen in the future. It only takes one nutter to spoil it for you, best be fully aware of what you are doing now.
Technorati Tags: privacy, risks, blogging, photography, news, flickr
One Comment
Only last week I sent an email to friends about this. A guy book marked me, when I took a look at his photo stream I was alarmed at what I saw. Looking at his groups, I can only assume it was photos of my kids he was interested in. I have taken the large amount of my family photos and moved them to friends and family only.