I mentioned not too long ago my concern about pictures of babies and children being taken from flickr accounts for use on the site Orkut (and goodness knows where else). Both Fickr and Orkut are run by Google. Think of Orkut as Google's version of MySpace (who knows...maybe by now Google owns MySpace as well!). Orkut is largely popular outside of the US. It is HUGE in Brazil. And as I mentioned in that previous post, there are a great number of people who create "fake" profiles on Orkut using portraits of kids and babies stolen from flickr. Weird, but true. For a long time I thought I might float relatively under-the-radar, but alas I finally received a flickr mail, from someone who's profile says they are a teenage girl, poorly translated from Portuguese (I'm guessing), asking for permission to use one of my girls' images.
hi :D
Hi I'm here to ask that you let me use their daughter as a model, her daughter is very beautiful and I do not want to use it without its approval, I will use it as a model for orkut fake. I am not sure of anything bad happened her.
Me authorizing use his daughter as a model?
Thank now.
Of course I responded with a resounding NO. The line "I am not sure of anything bad happened her" particularly freaked me out, although I'm confident this phrasing is a result of poor online translation software. She was probably trying to say "I will be sure nothing bad will happen to her" (or perhaps I'm just naive and delusional) but If you've got to state it, I guess that just means we're all aware of the frightening things that can happen online. Thankfully I realized that sarcasm does not usually translate well either (I wrote my return message in English thinking that many large "NO"s are part of a universal language we all speak). As a result, I left out the snarky comment "I am not sure of anything...you could be a 45 year old male pedophile." Needless to say, I am keeping an eye on my flickr stats and on Orkut.
In the meantime, this has me deliberating on the future of the blog. Words cannot even say how emotionally attached I am to this, and before I do anything, I plan on downloading a copy of my blog to blurb.com and having several books made of it. I've set all pictures of the girls that I haven't blogged about to "friends and family" permissions, but surprisingly I've blogged about almost everything in my photostream at this point. If I set all my pictures to have "friends and family" permissions they would disappear from the blog...so therein lies my quandry. I would hate to let some stolen pictures, or just the possibility of stolen pictures, stifle a form of expression I have grown to love over the past few years, but better safe than sorry. I am fully aware that when you place something online, you are making it available to the world, or at least the entire internet community, but I guess I'll need to give all of these weighted ponderings and questions some additional thought. Until then, I'll blog with pics directly from my computer...no more flickr for the time being.
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