Oh, the poor, precious children! Save them!
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There's a recurring phenomenon on the social photo sharing website, flickr. I don't know if it's because only sad, paranoid parents join flickr, or if flickr turns parents into sad paranoids. Either way, it's sad. And it's paranoid.
Here's the basic story: Some parent notices that photos of their child are appearing on another website, which is full of photos of children; or that someone in one of their photo sharing groups has nothing but photos of children in their photo "favorites", and suddenly they realize the horrifying truth: Pedophiles have been looking at photos of their children!!! What generally follows is frantic networking among all their flickr-parent friends, setting up a group specifically to protest the situation, emails to flickr support, and all around hysteria. And it's really pathetic.
They frantically tear their virtual hair out, asking WHY oh WHY have these nefarious cyber-perverts been able to "steal" photos of their precious little ones, when they have their account preferences set to disallow photo downloads. They rail against the heartless flickr overlords who won't lift a finger to save their children's photographic innocence. You can practically hear the frothing spittle spraying from their lips as they type.
See, here's the thing … the KEY thing that none of these parents seem to understand, and the reason flickr staff and everyone else are helpless to stem the tide of this pedo-ogling epidemic: Any image publicly viewable on the internet can be looked at by anyone. And stolen. It's a super-advanced (NOT!) technique called a "screen capture". The horrible, slavering pedophile hordes save an image of whatever is currently showing on their screen. And then they have it on their hard drive. And then they can post that photo any-fucking-where they please. And there is NOTHING but NOTHING flickr staff or ANYONE else can do to stop it.
Every time one of these little waves of hysteria crops up, a handful of brave, internet-savvy folks pipes up in one of the panicked discussion threads, and tries to explain this to the hyperventilating parents. I was once one of these Quixotic few. And I, along with the others, pointed out the painfully obvious fact of the matter: If you don't want pedophiles whacking off to photos of your adorable offspring, don't post them online. At the very least, set your kid photos to only ever be viewable by your contacts (or only your friends and family, depending on how closely you police your contact list). Do not add these photos to any publicly viewable photo groups. And that is that. Plain and simple.
You'd think after one or two of these ridiculous mass-panic incidents, the word might get around. People might not totally freak. People might start guarding their kiddie pics a little more carefully, if they're so worried about who looks at them. But no. If there's a sucker born every minute, there must be a half-dozen ignorant, panic-prone future parents popping out for every new sucker.
Don't get me wrong, I'm quite strongly anti-pedophilia. I do not support kiddie-fiddling in any way, shape, or form. But come on, now. You put your kids' photos online, and set them to be viewable by the general public. In what pollyanna bullshit universe does the internet come with an automatic pedo-filter attached to pictures of small children?! Like somehow, a computer monitor is going to auto-detect the user's level of sexual arousal, and make note of whether the photo they're viewing is animal, vegetable or mineral, and whether or not the object of desire is of the appropriate age of consent for their viewing location? (Or should it base detection on the age of consent at the photographer's location?) Or should flickr just ask new members whether or not they're pedophiles, and then block them from viewing any photos with child-related tags? GET REAL, PEOPLE!
Really, if you're going to play online, educate yourself first. Or just suck it up, and grow a sense of priorities.
Yeah. What she said. :)
4th February 2008 at 6:42 pm | permalink |tildy! she lives!
And I tend to make pics with my son contact only. Solves that easily.
4th February 2008 at 8:08 pm | permalink |Pretty much anything posted on the internet is public domain.. I don't mean legally, I mean that's what it effectively becomes and there's not much you can do about it.
6th February 2008 at 2:37 am | permalink |Isn't that whats great about the Internet? You can access ANYTHING!
25th February 2008 at 10:30 pm | permalink |you need to shut your damn bitching mouth up you cunt!
28th February 2008 at 4:52 pm | permalink |@david & katie: Yes. To both of you. :-)
@ted: ummm … OK. Sorry. I'll shut up now.
28th February 2008 at 5:07 pm | permalink |