Of Flickr & Facebook

Violation of Privacy

Humans are nothing but sociable creatures and as sociable as we are, we like to share the moments in our lives, the happiness, the sadness, the sorrow, with others. We did this with pictograms and cave drawings eons ago. Now we do it with photographs, using the World Wide Web.

A renowned website for photo-sharing and photo-management is Flickr.com. This website intends to ‘help people make their content available to the people who matter to them … to enable new ways of organizing photos and video …’ (About 2008).

However, the borderless nature of the Internet has provided unlawful or, to be a little exaggerative, illegal avenues for certain parties to use these picture posted by millions of people from around the world for their own benefits.

Source: Virgin Mobile

The Australian (Townend 2007) reported that Virgin Mobile, a cellular phone provider, violated ‘moral rights’ in that the company used photographs posted by people on Flickr.com for their advertising campaign, a national campaign at that, without the legal consent from the owners of the images.

Not only that, Virgin Mobile inserted ‘provocative captions’ (Townend 2007) together with the images! One such case was when a photograph of Alison Chang was used ‘under the slogan Dump Your Pen Friend’ (Townend 2007). She said ‘It is definitely insulting to myself.’ (Townend 2007).

(Source: Flickrgate)

Simon Longstaff, executive director of St James Ethics Centre said Virgin Mobile ‘might have breached “key moral rights.”’ (Townend 2007). The issue that can be identified from this example is that of the infringement of basic human rights, in this case, privacy.

Chapman & Dhillon (cited in Dhillon 2002, p.76) argued ‘… since the Internet has come into common use, the question now comes before us … "Are we still afforded the same rights to privacy as traditionally held?"’.

Obviously, the answer is no, or at least when the case of Virgin Mobile is taken into consideration. It was utterly unwarranted for Virgin Mobile to utilise personal photographs posted on Flickr for their national campaign and placed derogatory captions under them.

Another such incident was reported by BBC News where a legal complaint was filed against Facebook by a Canadian privacy group, “accusing it of violating privacy laws … The complaint … states that Facebook collects sensitive information about its users and shares it without their permission’ (Shiels 2008).

This claim may or may not be true as it is simply an allegation made by the group. However, it does raise some grave questions. Can we truly protect ourselves or our privacy when we use the Internet? Can we be sure that our pictures are not being used for illicit purposes?

Personally, I have not used Flickr to post or share any of my photographs because I think personal pictures should only be shared with your closest of kin and not the entire world.

This has also curbed any future occurrences whereby my images may be exploited under a slogan which might say “The Type of Guy You Should Not Date”.


References

About Flickr 2008, Flickr.com, viewed 8 June 2008, <http://flickr.com/about/>.

Dhillon, G 2002, Social Responsibility In The Information Age: Issues and controversies, Idea Group Inc (IGI), USA.

Shiels, M 2008, Facebook “violates privacy laws”, BBC News, viewed 4 June 2008, <<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7428833.stm>.

Townend, J 2007, Virgin “in the wrong” on ad rights, The Australian Online, viewed 4 June 2008, <http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,22115934-15306,00.html#>.

Wordpress.com 2007, Flickrgate, viewed 4 June 2008, <http://katiechatfield.wordpress.com/2007/07/25/virgin-mobile-flickr-lawsuit-flickrgate/>.