Flickr Photo Etiquette - Privacy versus Sharing

Yesterday I ran smack into to the middle of an issue of privacy versus sharing. An issue crucial and center to the idea of Identity 2.0. What had happened was that I posted on my flickr account (which for privacy reasons I'm not revealing ;-) ) a collection of photos of a recent reunion. I had then tagged the photos to allow others to contribute their own to the tagged set.

Well, that activity attracted some concern about privacy. To allay those concerns I made the pictures private for family members only. Then I realized that a lot of of family are too lazy or too confused to sign-up. So in essense they never see anything. Which defeats the original point of the sharing exercise. All the while I'm thinking, "If a tree falls in a forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?"

This lead me to come up with my own rules on photo posting etiquette:

You should ask the permission of the person in a photo if it is public. The more people in the picture the more difficult it is to get permission. For practical purpose if there are more than 20 people in the picture, privacy is sufficiently diluted that one need not ask anyone.

One should ask the permission of the all parents if minors are in the picture.

One does not need permission for pictures of people who's identity cannot be discerned (i.e. bystanders, backsides, blurred out faces, crowds of people etc.)

Inanimate objects cannot be asked, therefore unless the owner explicitly says its forbidden then you can post it in public. The same policy applies to animals, plants and fungi.

That said, only non-intelligent subjects (and maybe pictures of myself) are the only things that should be public on my flickr account.

One would expect to see similar rules in photo journalism. However, this does bring up an interesting question. Do the rules of photo journalism apply for public tagging in flickr? I know that there's been a lot of talk lately on the issue of political blogging whether they should go under the same rules as main stream media. I haven't followed any of the arguments, so I don't really have much of an opinion on it. There are of course obvious correlations between the arguments of blogging vs journalism and flickr vs photo journalism.

Although I blog, I don't blog about my personal life. However, I do use flickr and it is a photo chronicle of where I've been and who I've seen. In fact, it's a photo chronicle of not just me but of millions of other users. That fact may in fact be the key to the issue of privacy and sharing.

The CIA/NSA/FBI despite having enormous computing resources for decryption faces an insurmountable task of monitoring the communication activities of potential terrorist. Decryption works if you know of the presence of a secret signal. In a world where there are billions of connections (not necessarily asynchronous), it becomes a impossibility of discovering the presence of a signal. Decryption becomes essentially ineffective if you don't know what to decrypt.

In the world of flickr, it is anonimity that keeps privacy. If one uses tags and descriptions that are essentially 'encrypted', then it becomes painstakingly difficult to discover the existence of a photo. That is "if there is a photo posted in flickr and there is nobody who can find it, is it even posted?"

It's also ironic that the social network that enables privacy also works against it. Afterall, who you share with and who you watch are sometimes private and personal. Even worse, the fact that you can't disassociate an individual photo from your collection can work against your own privacy. Sometimes the existence or absence of a photo exposes more than its actual content. So, in the end the fact that people know that you have an account invades your own privacy. But isn't that what sharing is all about? That is, revealing a bit of your personal life.