The number of stories erupting in the news about how people feel violated by the ‘public’ browsing through ‘personal’ photos on social network sites has led to a new craze; Voyeurism Photo Canvas Printing . It seems a strange thing, but a recent exhibition in Amsterdam was created purely from images scraped from social network sites, such as Flickr and Facebook. All the images were used legally as the appropriate permission restrictions had not been set correctly by the official copyright holder of the image. The exhibition had mixed reviews, but was evident, was the simple fact that any stranger can view numerous images of you and can then ultimately do what they like with those pictures.
Converting the Facebook profile pictures of strangers into photo canvases may be a touch extreme, but just a few years ago it became commonplace for people to download images of strangers that they thought were amusing and then alter the image in photo-editing software and then re-post the image on a blog. Often people found themselves the inadvertent star of a viral marketing video, or the latest hot topic on Digg, or Reddit. This craze also swept through video posts, but the voice dubbing and added effort and required skills meant that this is not seen as invasive as exploiting an image of somebody else.
The recent news story about the Facebook stalker in the UK brings to life the powerful effect social network sites have on our lives. One 14 year old girl in the UK accidently posted an image of herself in the public domain posing for her boyfriend, and suddenly she became famous as people shared the image and most importantly the story. Celebrities are also affected by the spread of personal images across the internet, Scarlett Johansson found herself to be the talk of the town when nude voyeuristic images of her where uploaded on to the web from her early days as a struggling actress. So what can be done about this invasion of privacy? Well, virtually nothing once the image is out there, the most important thing you can do is set your privacy setting to the maximum level so only friends and family can access your images, hopefully you will then be able to trust those people enough so that your personal and embarrassing images do not get publicised throughout the world. Otherwise imagine your horror if you walked into an exhibition and saw a photo canvas printing display including voyeuristic photographs of yourself.
Dean Altman works for YourImage2Canvas.co.uk and helps on the social media strategy of the photo canvas printing company, helping to promote competitions and also the brand. He loves digital imaging and finding ‘unlocked’ personal profiles of strangers.
