Sharing Photos Safely on the Internet

Today more and more of us are sharing our photo’s with others online. This can be done today using our digital cameras and cell phones as soon as the events happen.. No doubt, these options are another wonderful way of using technology but it’s important to be sure you are sharing your photos safely..

Almost all cell phones today have cameras, and because most of us carry our cell phones with us all the time - and the quality of the cell phones cameras have and continue to improve almost daily - they are becoming a popular way to post photos as soon as we take the picture...We may post them to our online photo-sharing accounts (such as Picasa Web Albums, Walgreens, Snapfish, PhotoBucket etc accounts, our blogs, mobile blogs (called moblogs); personal Web sites; or share them via our e-mails and IM - no doubt sharing our photos and videos has never been easier.

But it’s important to carefully manage who sees your digital images, from photos to videos, is critical to avoiding the potential exposure of private or personal information to people outside your trusted friends and family. The same pictures and videos you want to share with friends and family may contain information that also has value to criminals.

Only use reputable sites (such as Picasa Web Albums, Walgreens, Shutterfly, Snapfish and others we’ve discussed in class) and only share photos that contain identifiable information with people you trust.

To make photos with identifiable information safer to share publicly:

• Use a photo editing tool such as Picasa that we work with in our classes, or Windows Photo Gallery to cover up or crop out information that could put you or the people in your photos in harms way, such as house or apt. numbers, street names, name of your school or business, etc – Photo Editing sites allow you to blur small sections of your photos, so you can then put them online safely.


• Remove metadata from the photo. Some sites allow viewers to see the settings used to take the photo, the time and date when the photo was taken, and even show the geographical coordinates of the place where the photo was taken if the camera or camera phone documents this information. The last thing you want "just anyone" being able to see is the actual address of your home, school or day care center when you took pictures of your kids or grandkids...


• Change/reduce the resolution of the photo – because lower resolution makes it less likely that others will copy the photo.

Facebook - Photo Tagging Safety

One of the most popular features on Facebook is "photo-tagging" but it's also an easy way for companies to "send advertisements" by tagging their products with your name & your friends. Hopefully these tips will help you to avoid that from happening and also show you how to protect your privacy and your friends...

The privacy settings on Facebook allow you to limit who sees photos tagged with your name, and you can even prevent your name from showing up in your friends' photo-tag suggestions. But you can't opt-out of photo-tagging completely, and you can't stop third-party applications from tagging your friends' names on photos on your wall once you've accidentally given the apps access.

It's important to be careful and to make sure your privacy settings are “secure” so that you don't inadvertently allow advertisers and/or spammers to see your profile and get to your friends to spread their advertisements via your Facebook wall, for all your friends to see! across Facebook

How it's done: When you click the link to the photo album, thinking you're about to see a photo album of your cousins wedding or your friends birthday party, instead, it's something like a photo album full of the amenities at some hotel or the latest menu specials from a local restaurant chain and they are tagged with many names of people who don't appear in the picture but have simply been “tagged”. When you first see it, if you don’t see your cousin or friend – don’t go any further, because if you do click on the photo to find out more and go too far, you might just be agreeing to give the application access to your account and your friends on Facebook will begin to receive notices that you’ve been tagged in a photo – and the unfortunate cycle has begun!!

Hopefully we’ve warned you in time, but if not it’s easy to remedy-just remove the application from accessing your profile by:

• >Immediately remove any contents (posts, photos etc) that the “company/spammer” has posted on your Facebook wall about the phony event
• Now, go to your Account Settings in the upper right side of your screen
• When the drop-down menu appears, click/choose Privacy Settings
• On the bottom right side of the Privacy Settings Page, click/choose the Apps & websites link
• Now choose "Edit your settings."
• On the App page, next to "Apps you use," select "edit settings"
• Now you will see the third-party apps that have access to your Facebook profile. Delete any applications you don’t want and try to check this setting regularly to protect yourself and your friends
• Apologize to your friends who might have been tagged by this company and remind them to do the same thing to protect "your name" - together, if we are all diligent about our privacy settings, we can help to minimize these problems....