Shanti’s Dispatches

(full size)

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

This place has the best freakin’ blintzes ever:

You can view the rest on Flickr.

These are licensed as Attribution Share Alike - which means you can use them, sell them, mash em up, etc so long as you also share them under the same license. You’re also supposed to credit the original producer (”Attribution”) but I don’t even care about that. (some people do, a lot)

ps - you can use this page to batch update your Flickr photos to use whichever Creative Commons license you prefer. Hat tip, WikiHow.

What’s the most popular term people use when searching for these?

… and the winner is: Pictures.

Hat tip, Charles Coxhead!