UGN InfoManager

A person on a grocery coupon mailing list I subscribe to made this point:

"I have removed all pictures of mine and everyone else's children off our group site and will be setting my 360 page to where only friends can see and read my blog and see pictures."

Good idea. The commenter goes on:

"Police and my mother have both warned me that being active in the community and having pictures of my family opens me up more for attacks. As a precautionary measure you all might consider doing the same. Although as mothers we are all proud of our babies, you just do not know who is seeing your child too. ..."

As we know, there are a lot of "bad" people on the net.

While we talk a lot about spammers and phishers, we haven't mentioned much about these types of potential problems. Mostly we have mentioned problems of posting personal data on social web sites like MySpace. But these other personal sites also can be a problem. It would be best to post them to a password-protected page and give out passwords to trusted friends and relatives.

Lynn

Case in point

Lynn, you're exactly right!

Over the years we've gotten a number of inquiries from user group members and readers in general who have had some problem or other stemming from photos of family on the web. I've seen situations from plain theft, to photos used and modified for other web pages, to photos ending up in online stock photo catalogs for sale.

One case in point that I still remember vividly, occurred a few years back. A young woman used the UGN contact form looking for help tracking down a web site to find the owner. She had read one of the "spam" articles and though we could help.

A not-so-honest woman had stolen photos of the birth of our reader's new daughter. The thief's web site claimed that it was her baby -- setting it up as if it were really true. The photos turned up in a Google search -- the thief had neglected to change the names of the files!

After chiding the reader for posting photos publicly, we went to work and actually chased the thief down through her ISP. She was obviously sick -- and wanted a baby so badly that she took the photos to live out her fantasy on the web. She did render a fully apology, and removed the images.

At the time, I had considered posting the whole story to the Safenet department, but it just didn't seem right. Now, I kind of wish I had saved the screens and email threads, to illustrate the point to our readers.

While no real harm came from this episode, it gives pause for thought. In this case, the individual was harmless. However, there are many, many evil people out there who are not harmless. All blogs and picture sites these days offer the option of making a "private" directory. Read the documentation and FAQ for the site, and put your photos up safely.

Fred

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