But even if you go to all these lengths to protect your identity, you can never be sure that all your information is completely safe.
Now I don't think Georgina Baillie, the woman at the centre of the 'Sachsgate' scandal, should need much introduction. I was actually acquainted with Georgina about two years ago, albeit through a rather tenuous link - she was friends with the girlfriend of someone in my social circle at the time. Let's call the girlfriend 'A'. As the controversy escalated last week, I clicked on to the website of a national newspaper to read what was being said about Georgina. They had harvested several photos from her MySpace account, and one in particular gave me a shock.
Nope, it wasn't stills from her dance troup's "cheerleader massacre" routine, it was a rather more innocent picture of her with some friends on a night out. And who was standing next to her? 'A'.
'A' had not even uploaded the picture up to MySpace herself, Georgina had. But now her image was splashed over national news without her consent and without her control.
'A' had not even uploaded the picture up to MySpace herself, Georgina had. But now her image was splashed over national news without her consent and without her control.
As social media continues to play an ever-larger part in our lives, should we be educating people more about its benefits and risks? It could help the non-new-media-literate elderly and disabled, providing them with greater access to services and community, but also ensure that we all know about the risks to our privacy and personal information.
3 comments:
And you've hit on a crucial point here - what are the ethics of lifting pictures from a social network?
It's open to the web, so it is OK? After all, if you wanted it to be private you shouldn't have put it on MySpace?
Or mitts off, this is private in public and not for you national press?
Lots of thinking going on around this, be interested to hear what you would do if you were asked to grab pics to go with a story you were doing.
Definitely, the point made in the blog is extremely resonant and brings me to conclusion that it's finally time to reign it in with some serious force and place clear legal limits on the use of images without permission from those in the photo itself.
Especially those of a suggestive or socially damaging nature.
In the web, I feel we've let modern society create a monster and few have stopped to control it or question it with any great urgency or weight. In one respect, I guess we all have to accept some sort of responsibility by default when it comes back to bite us - we have all used the web either illegally or unethically to our own individual advantage whether that be socially (through scoping out people's private information for personal gain/gratificiation) or as consumers (by stealing music/programs) so it's hard to expect the ruthless media not to do the same.
But now it is finally time to get real and protect the innocents and unwillings privacy once and for all.
We wouldn't stand for it if the government or unethical civillians (maybe these two forces are one and the same for many), were accessing and abusing private photos and docs without permission... so why should the media do the same?
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