Privacy: Risen from the Grave

I perform elaborate mental acrobatics to find and justify a comfortable distance to Frances's story, to wit: I do not record Frances's story here. Frances's story is hers to record. What I record here is my story; and Frances is an inescapable part of my story. I cannot write my own life without her in it. It would be false, wrong, insulting, horrible.

But I do not own her face. Legally, I own the representations of her face that I make when I photograph her, but I do not own her face. Her face is the Frances the world sees, and no psuedonym will ever obscure it.

My words can be stolen, and have been; I don't like it, but they're only words. As long as my words stay the same, it may be plagiarism, but it's still obviously my story about Frances, not Frances's story. If the words are stolen and changed, then not only is it not Frances's story, it's not even my story about Frances; it has no relation to her at all. It could be about any number of Frances's in the world. No one she meets by random in the grocery store or at a job interview is likely to confuse them. But her face?

If her face is stolen, there is nothing that can get it back, it is immediately recognizable to anyone who sees her, and it becomes worse if someone mutilates it.

I'm not afraid of pedophiles. All right, I am not afraid of pedophiles, very much. Anyone determined to source pedophiliac recreations could carry his camera phone into any local playground and find ample material for whatever fantasies he dreams up. This is much less likely to lead to exposure or capture than electronic searches, which leave their dirty fingerprints all over everything and will really get you in trouble when the police confiscate your computer.

I'm afraid of jerks.

~~~~~

You know how I have my own nifty domain name and everything? I could never go back. Besides having more control and being able to do layouts that are all purty and stuff, I could never blog with peace of mind without a comprehensive web usage analysis program, which I get through my host.

Within a few months of making the blog public, I noticed on my webhost's stats program that I was getting a lot of visitors from a specific livejournal page, but no hits. Visitors without hits, I have learned, are a bad sign: basically it means "something is going from your site to theirs but no one is coming through a link or viewing your content in place." I didn't know this at the time; I just cut the url out of the stats program, pasted it into Explorer and hit enter. To find one of my favourite photos of Frances linked to on the blog of a fratboy asshole, and following it, a detailed discussion of "what was wrong with her" amongst his friends.

It could have been worse. Much worse. If he had right-clicked, saved and then uploaded the image, I'd never have found out, and if I had, there would have been nothing I could do. As it was, I deleted the image from my server, which deleted it from his page.

Sitemeter will never tell you if this is happening, because it only tracks people who come through to read your site directly, and those imperfectly. I always have more hits show up on my webhost's program than I do on sitemeter. Sitemeter does not track people who have posted a link to one of your images and then viewed it on another page for the same reason that it won't show your written content being pirated on Bitacle.

Now that I've removed all of the images that show Frances's face, the Myspace and Livejournal referrals of visitors-without-pageviews has plummeted to nearly zero, and the ones that remain are people I know.

Remember two things:

1. This happened within a few short months of going public. My readership at that time was very small. You do not have to be a big blog with a big readership for your images to be pirated.

2. This was not the only such link I found. There were several other complimentary ones (look at this cute kid! What big blue eyes!) which, while less traumatic, still drove the point home. My little piddly blog with such sweet innocent photos of my little girl was attracting some very strange attention from corners of the internet that had nothing to do with kids or with mothers.

~~~~~

At the time, I didn't take what seemed like drastic measures. Instead, I stopped saving and uploading photos with actual names, and used date tags for the titles. Because Google? Indexes and caches images by keyword. Filenames and tags are keywords, and Google will index and cache those images.

Meaning that a photo with a filename of "Annas-first-bath.jpg" will come up on google, on whatever page, if someone does a search for "first bath." But a photo titled "060321.jpg" will come up on search for "060321."

This helped, and it's still a good idea; but several months later it happened again.

I was diligent. I checked the webhost stats every day for suspicious referrals. But that's not how I found out about it. The only reason I learned about the second image was because a reader here recognized Frances's photo and alerted me to its presence on fark.com.

I didn't find this one myself because the thief was smarter than the first: he right-clicked and saved it so he could photoshop it. There is no technology on earth would allow me to discover or control this use, and no way to enforce the laws meant to prevent this. Her image had been cut out of the photo I'd taken and spliced into a swamp, making it look like she was a big mutant swamp monster. (Fortunately, I was able to track down his contact info and guilt him into taking it down.)

Think this is just my bad luck? A horrible fluke? No. Dawn, of This Woman's Work, had the same problem: photos were stolen, she started using numbers for filenames, photos were still stolen. Again, she has her own domain name and her own webhost. That's what allowed her to track it down and deal with it. She doesn't post pictures of her kids on her blog anymore.

If you do not have access to a webhost with a good stats program, you should assume that any photo you post is being indexed and cached by Google according to filename, including keywords in the post it is embedded in. You should assume that it is being stolen. People can post your pictures of your kids (or you) on their profiles on social networking sites, on their own blogs, in their signature files on bulletin boards. They may see the beauty that you do; they may instead see an opportunity to ridicule or disparage.

I have heard of several cases of people stealing photos of children to post on their sites as their own children. Worse (much worse), I've had occasion to interact with people who believe that anyone stupid enough to post a picture on the internet deserves to have it downloaded and their face photoshopped onto the picture of a donkey being fucked in the ass by Bill Clinton. They see publicly posted photographs as an opportunity to practice what they perceive as vigilante put-in-your-placeness.

Sitemeter is not capable of informing you when another site links to your images.

Blogger (and so far as I know, typepad and wordpress) will not provide you with the tools to track these down.

And Flickr (owned by Yahoo), where so many bloggers store their photographs, owns them once you post them:

"...with respect to Content you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Service, you grant Yahoo! the following worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license(s), as applicable: ... With respect to photos, graphics, audio or video you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Service other than Yahoo! Groups, the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Service solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available."

Once you put the photo up, there's no way you can control its use until you take it down. Considering that the only legal avenue to misuse of posted photographs currently is copyright violation, this is important.

Yes, there are all kinds of tools that Flickr makes available that will tell you that you control the privacy. It's horseshit. Unless you restrict the photo so that no one can see it--in which case, you can't post it on your blog, either--anyone with a graphics program can look at your photo on flickr and do a screen capture, then crop the photo out in an editing program. Any image that is publicly viewable is publicly downloadable regardless of privacy and piracy settings. I also specifically read over the site to find if there is any way you can access stats about who is viewing your photos or where they are coming from. There isn't.

Blogger too allows uploading of image files. Want to hear what blogger has to say about image theft?

"Blogger is a provider of content creation tools, not a mediator of that content. We allow our users to create blogs, but we don't make any claims about the content of these pages. In cases where a contact email address is listed on the page, we recommend working directly with the author to have this situation remedied."

In other words: "tough shit, user; you're on your own."

If you have more than a handful of readers, it is also prudent to assume that some unknown percentage of your audience actually hates you and reads you primarily for the thrill of being able to slag you over later on. It's not safe to assume that every reader you have has the same impulsive adoration of your baby or your child, or the same respect for the innocence of children, or the same appreciation of whatever values that photograph holds for you.

If someone steals my words and claims them as their own--well, it stinks, but no one is going to watch Frances and me walking down the street and say, "Hey, there's Frances! She's that little girl who did xyz on that website I was reading!" But if someone steals her picture? A picture that shows her face? "Hey, there's the mutant swamp monster! There's that kid that has FAS! There's the baby from so-and-so-'s MySpace profile picture!" I know, I know, what are the chances? Still. It's recognizable. It's uncontrollable. And no one out there is going to get that picture back for you once it's gone.

We're social creatures who relate to each other from our earliest lives and primarily throughout life through our faces. That's part of what makes blogs with photographs so appealing, what increases their readership and promotes all those affirming comments. We like faces. They make us relatable. That's also what makes photographs that show faces so vulnerable to abuse.

It isn't unreasonable to think that I'm a bit nuts over this. But do be careful. Be sure that whatever you're posting is something you're comfortable with being stolen, altered, photoshopped, and posted by fratboys in a discussion forum or as user icons on someone's LiveJournal page.

Posted by Andrea at February 22, 2007 6:48 AM under

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