Your Internet Pictures Can Be Used Without Your Consent or Knowledge
By meme0907
@meme0907 (3481)
United States
October 27, 2007 8:13pm CST
One of my friends here had an experience where a personally "owned pic was used w/o consent at any rate it got me searching around & check out what I found:
One of the biggest trends on the Internet is posting photos online. The pictures of your camping trip. The snaps of your kid’s soccer game. The photos of your wedding, so the people who couldn’t attend can share your joy. More and more sites on the Internet are organized around stored photographs, like Shutterfly, SmugMug, and Snapfish. At last count, the photo-sharing website Flickr had over one billion images online. Users can search through the digital photos of strangers, looking for topics, faces or locations that interest them. Here’s something you might not know: Your pictures can be used for other purposes without your consent or knowledge!
According to The New York Times, a woman in Iceland says an online gallery sold her photos without her permission, a German photographer discovered that one of his photos was used for a Norwegian political campaign, and a 15-year-old Dallas girl got unexpected international recognition. She was goofing around with a friend at a church-sponsored car wash and a youth counselor snapper her picture and posted it online. A few months later, her photo was plastered on advertising billboards in Australia - without her permission. The billboards depicted her as the “loser pen-pal” American friend you could get rid of if only you bought a cell phone! It was a major ad campaign for a huge global company – Virgin Mobile. Now, she and her family are in court suing for damages.
How could this happen? The photographer who posted her picture thought his snaps would only be of interest to other church members. So he clicked on a release form allowing anybody to use his photographs for any purpose. Unfortunately, he didn’t think that a giant cell phone company might put one in an ad. Even though photographers own the rights to their pictures, unless the person in that picture signs a release, it can’t be used for commercial purposes.
So, how can you avoid picture permission problems? If you post pictures online, don’t click “agree” on a blanket release form allowing anyone to use your pictures for anything. Many companies assume you got permission from the people in the pictures if you agree to it.
I wonder do we have a blanket release form allowing anyone to use our pictures for anything?
3 people like this
9 responses
@pyewacket (43903)
• United States
28 Oct 07
I only just recently safeguarded my photos, by getting software that I can add my copyright notice on---I have to now sift through all my photos I've scan and digitized to make the copyright version of it as well..When someone puts a copyright notice directly on the photo there's less chance of someone using it for their own use--also it does tend to make it look more professional as usually only use pros do use a watermark to safeguard our photos.
Have an example here
2 people like this
@GardenGerty (157579)
• United States
28 Oct 07
Hey friend, do you mind posting information about that software, or including it in a discussion or something?
1 person likes this
@foxyfire33 (10005)
• United States
28 Oct 07
I have never seen such a release allowing it or protecting us from it. I'm guessing all images on here are pretty much free for the taking unfortunately.
I do want to add another disturbing trend in photo stealing I discovered while I was a member of another forum. It was a forum for new and expecting parents. People would come on and talk about there children often sharing photos of them. Once in a while though it would be discovered that a person would be a total fraud. These people had made up the stories, made up the children and quite often made up premature and ill babies for sympathy. One even went as far as claiming her baby was not expected to survive the night before she was finally caught. These people would get away with these stories for months and in one case a full two years (and two seperate faked pregnancies, the second of which was supposedly twins who were premature and critical) How did they do it? By stealing other people's pregnancy and baby photos and claiming them as there own...even photos of real premature babies who really were in the hospital and dying. It was sickening to think that the real families would most likely never even know how their personal photos had been used.
2 people like this
@foxyfire33 (10005)
• United States
29 Oct 07
They got banned as soon as they got caught! And everyone was notified about the banning and told exactly why they were banned and how they were caught. A few would on occasion make a new account to come back in and either apologize or insist they were telling the truth, but by the their reputation was completely shot so they never stayed.
1 person likes this
@MGjhaud (23192)
• Philippines
30 Oct 07
That’s a huge possibility in the world of Internet. Everybody can do anything as long as they have the knowledge to do it. Some Internet users just don’t care about terms of use or the terms and guidelines; they don’t care what’s written in it. As long as the availability of the resource is free, they’re going to get it.
@Perry2007 (2229)
• Philippines
11 Nov 07
this is cruel, identity theif. so what happens when we use our photo share system. we have no safety in the net after all.
Are we left to hope there will be no such thing that will happen to our pictures, or identity?
@maybebaby (1230)
• Canada
28 Oct 07
I was aware of this before. I try not to post any personal photos on the internet because you never know who's going to get a hold of them and what they're going to do with them. I've been looking into getting some safeguard software, but I'm not sure how effective it really is. My brother is a computer programmer and can get around all teh safeguard software fairly easily. I guess it would stop the common person from stealing your photos but if someone with some knowledge wanted the picture, I'm not sure what we really can do to stop them.
1 person likes this
@arkaf61 (10881)
• Canada
28 Oct 07
There is nothing protecting anybody from having this done and that is the reason why it is so important to be careful when we post pictures. It might seem such a nice thing posting pictures for friends and family but unless your pictures are in a locked page with a password - and even if they do sometimes - they can be viewed by anybody. and used in any possible way.
I rarely post personal pictures on the net. I have many images that I make that I don't mind sharing but not personal pictures. In the few instances that I do they are in my own personal page and there is a password to enter them. This way I minimize the problem.
The problem is that people don't realize the danger, they just thing it's great to post those pictures - young people for example post zillions of photos in myspace, or facebook. If you don't want those pictures to end up being used for something else that they weren't supposed to, it is important to understand that each photo can be copied, saved and them not only repost somewhere else by someone else but also manipulated in many different ways.
Forget about permission or not, there are many people who wouldn't worry about that for a minute.
The safe way is either not posting personal photos or be very careful if you do. Or just email the pictures to friend's and family instead.
@shadowing (308)
• Malaysia
28 Oct 07
Hi Meme.
Yea, it is what we are facing right now, people are using some others' photo without the owner's permission.
Even from time to time I visit to website, I will see a lot of common photo which uploaded on their website where I know they actually downloaded from the Internet. Haha.
I guess we people should watermark the photo before uploading the photo onto the Internet. Though it still can be removed using some software touch up at least they have to do some extra work. Haha.
1 person likes this
