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The truth about pixies and pixels
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When you share something on the Net, be savvy and beat the voyeurs in their own game, says SERISH NANISETTI
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PHOTO: SANDEEP SAXENA
JUBLIANT STUDENTS After getting good marks in the Xth Class Board Exam in New Delhi on Friday.
I want to surprise our friends with photographs that we clicked recently. Is there a way I can do it without telling the whole world about it?
ABC
This question posed by a young woman on a tech-help site is typical of the choice being created in the digital age. A choice between our private selves and our public persona in an age where your fleeting fame is just 10 clicks away.
One of the goodies of the digital age is the unlimited number of photographs that one can have. What does one do with thousands of photographs and 1GB memory card in the camera? Simple. Not unlike the dude in the rediffmail ad, who has 3807 photographs of his girlfriend, uploads them on to some photo-sharing site.
The trouble is here. Instead of the photo album being available to a select few as a pre-dinner family or get-together ritual, bored blokes can look and search for cues to their perversion. It is a paying perversion where these photographs are used as a tease leading on to pornographic sites or search sites. And the fellows who do the dirty business get paid according to the number of people they bring in to the site.
These are total strangers who are hacking, phreaking into computers to hijack content and relationships, but there is another version of privacy intrusion where the guards are not usually up.
Take Ridisha (pseudonym) who not only found her photo on a social networking site, but discovered to her chagrin that she had become the worst gossip monger among her group. Apparently, someone copied her photograph, created a false email ID and then created a profile on the site and networked with her known friends and acquaintances, and what's more galling, bad-mouthing her pals and even her relatives.
This is not a one-off incident. As a generation of teenagers discover Internet and its possibilities, the first thing they confront is this privacy intrusion. Where group photographs, party photographs and family photographs are misused and end up on filthy bulletin boards. It doesn't usually end there, after the photographs, the profiles are created and then comes the mail or phone call or worse a knock on the door.
What if this happened to you? "I would be disgusted and shocked that people are stooping so low to derive entertainment. I'd want to find a way to prevent this. I would use tools like Snag-it to watermark my photographs etc. I can't stop posting images online as I run a blog and it is difficult for me to have a picture-less blog. It would be great if we could have more online laws to prevent such things from happening. Online giants like Google and Yahoo should pro-actively monitor extreme cases and remove them from their search results," says Amrita Kamat, an infotech employee. The difficulty of the choice in this instant gratification world is articulated by another infotech employee Arni Bhavani, "If I were in the situation you described, I would be horrified if someone does some hanky-panky with my photographs or profiles. It's sad that I cannot take any legal help. I would in this case turn to the general public (smart youngsters) and seek their support. I would also want to take a collective opinion on how we can tackle such situations and propose proactive ways of avoiding such incidents in future rather than waiting for someone else to become a victim."
This is easier said than done as can be guessed from Minal Panchal episode where her Orkut profile was flooded with scraps after her death and then some guys took over and created her profiles in order to collect more scraps even after Orkut deleted her original profile.
In the end, keeping your Internet privacy and sanity intact is not just about being safe but also savvy about the possibilities.
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