Shanti’s Dispatches

I just posted this comment over at SmugMug Blog, but they have moderation turned on so just in case they don’t let it go through:

I think you could end up being okay here so long as you made it very clear when people can specify “private” that they know that their pictures are basically leaked onto the Internet.

When I think “private”, I personally do not think “leaked onto the Internet” for the world to see.

Example scenario:
* a scr1pt kiddie group, let’s say, called Anonymous, writes a script to pilfer a good chunk of your 250 million photos (maybe using proxy servers & the like to download all of them)
* they then setup a distributed website to let people go through them by hand & identify “incriminating photos”, let’s say 1% of the total pilfered.

They then package these into a .torrent and upload it to The Pirate Bay.

All of a sudden Bob & Susie’s “private” erotic bedtime / beach photos have been downloaded 50k times by Interweb geeks, archived for eternity for the entire Internets to see.

Sound like a stretch? 576,000 “private” MySpace photos (not all of them were really private, but still) downloadable at this moment on TBP:

http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3985864/%5Btribalwar.com%5D_567_000_private_myspace_pictures

You can bookmark this, digg this or check the cosmos