How safe is it?

This post was lying in my drafts from a long time. Finally finished it 😀

These days the only updates I see on Facebook are photos of friends who traveled around the world or had a baby or got married. I have been thinking about how safe  it is to put photos on Facebook. If you set the privacy to friends, it is less risky. But most people do not change the privacy. By default, any photo you post is public unless you change the privacy. I see honeymoon photos which have privacy set to public! I see lot of people making their profile picture public and then say this guy sent me friend request, that guy flirted with me. If you put dozens of your pics and not protect them, some spammer will use them.

Some people think putting kids pics as profile picture is very much safer than putting their own photos. There are some who put the entire family photo as cover photo. As you might already know, cover photos are always public. So any person can take those photos and misuse them for anything he wishes. I have seen websites with photos of girls taken from Facebook.

Are only girls under such threat? Not necessarily. What if someone takes your photo and uses it to make a fake passport? There are hundreds of ways to misuse your “public” photo. I do not like it if some friend of mine puts my photo and tags me on Facebook. There have been instances when I have requested them to remove my photo from Facebook. I do not feel safe putting my photos. But I do put few photos, maybe one or two once in a while so that my friends will not have difficulty in identifying me when they meet me 😛

• Putting 100s of pics of kids. I have seen friends upload album full of photos on Facebook. Is it safe to do that? Just because they are kids, how do you know those photos will not be misused by some random person?
• Taking pics of random people without them noticing it and then putting it on the blog/Facebook/any public place. I find it equivalent to invading somebody’s privacy. How ethical is it?
• Putting pics of others’ children, without their permission on your blog/Facebook. If someone did this to my kid, I don’t know how I would react.
• Putting pics of children (own or others) on blog/Facebook. Now think about the future. He/She may not like the fact that their childhood photos were made public and some other spam sites took these pics and misused them.
• Taking pics of poor people without their permission and putting it on the blog/Internet., like a beggar you saw on the street. Just because he won’t sue you, is it right to take his pics and then upload them on the Internet?

Our earlier generation had no such problems because they did not have Internet. Now that we have Internet and everything that we post can be seen by every single person in this world, may be we should take caution? May be we should think before making something public?

Agree/disagree? What do you think about making personal photos public?