Picture Perfect

I magine the following scenario. You are sitting on the Internet and you cannot wait to join a really fascinating website your friend told you about. You are really keen to make your very own profile, list down your hobbies and your likes and dislikes, join new forums and interact with people of your age and interests. After you have sat down and filled out the detailed forms on the said website, a webpage comes up which asks you to upload a photograph to be displayed with your profile. You hunt down your latest and best looking photo from the ones that were recently snapped with your digital camera, and in no time at all, you have a profile ready with you smiling from ear to ear in the photograph alongside it.Then, you discover that there is actually an option to add an entire album. Well, you access the photographs of your latest class get-together and put up the entire stock of photographs complete with captions.But wait a second. Should you be using that photograph option in the first place? If you look closely, it is not at all necessary to display a photograph. You can easily skip that step. But why should you? Why should your profile look bland when everyone else’s is looking so sophisticated because of the lovely personal photographs?The question of whether you should or should not put up your photograph online is, of course, something that you have to answer yourself. But there are a few things that must be kept in mind at all times. Many websites ask you to display your photograph, but the issues remain the same. Let’s take a quick look at some of these issues with the photographs.The first issue of course, is privacy. It is important to realise that this is the Internet one is talking about. Anyone and everyone who has a computer and an Internet connection can log on to the same website. And hence, anyone in the world can view your complete profile and photograph. And maybe it does not concern you if someone from somewhere across Africa sees your photo, but what if people in your city come to recognise you?There can be many people not just in your city but the area in which you live who use the same website and interact with you online. Would you like it if someone stopped you in the supermarket and demanded of you as to why you wrote something on a community or why you never replied to his/her message? If your profile is without a photograph, no one would be able to recognise you by face. You would have a protective shield around you. But once you reveal what you look like, well, then you pretty much give yourself away.Closely related to the privacy issue is the security concern. As mentioned earlier, your photograph is your basic identity. There are many people on the Internet who would simply glance at your profile and hence your photograph, and then move on to do their work. But there are many others who would not have such noble intentions.Over the Internet, it is really easy to save just about any photograph on one’s own personal computer and then manipulate it. With new and advanced photo editing software available in the market, it would be really easy for anyone who is good at graphic designing to save your photograph and do just about whatever he/she wants to do with it. The scariest part is that you will never know who did it or where does your photo reach or for what purposes it is used.And if you think this is exaggeration beyond measure, here is a little incident to reinforce the theory. Some months back, there was a message floating around a popular social networking website, Orkut, that there are many spammers on the lookout for those female members of the website who have put up their photographs so that they can save and manipulate their photos for their own not-so-noble intentions.Another point to consider is the privacy policy of the website where you are putting up your photo. The fact is that these privacy policies, which are freely available for you to read on their websites, have very cleverly written a few things which you can only find out when you go through them very carefully. At the start of the policy document of course, they tell you that they will protect your information, but many of them clarify somewhere in the middle that any information you share on their website (along with the photograph) can be exchanged with third parties. Very few websites actually define who these third parties actually are, and how this information will be used.So basically you should be considering these basic issues when deciding whether or not to display your photograph for public viewing online. Of course, there is a great temptation to put up photos like everyone else, and sometimes you just have to stop yourself from doing what everyone else is doing. But there are a few things which you can do which would address your safety concerns and ensure that you enjoy your time in cyberspace.First and foremost, you can avail the picture option on websites to show off your photography skills. Take photos of your plants or the sunrise, and put those up. You will have an exotic picture to go with your profile and it won’t be a personal picture either. There are loads of possibilities once you have the digital camera, and there’s no reason why you cannot experiment by snapping different photos and putting them up online for everyone to see without compromising your privacy and security.Of course there are times when you want to share your photos with your friends. There are times when there is a family event and you need to show the photos to your relatives living abroad. For such purposes, you can use websites like Shutterfly (www.shutterfly.com). On that website, you simply need to make an account, upload your photographs, label them as private so that only those who you choose can see them and then of course share the link with your family and friends.The privacy policy of Shutterfly clarifies that “In order to provide quality products, the Shutterfly employees and third-party service providers fulfilling your order or providing Customer Support to you may see your pictures.” Of course, this means that your photographs are not completely private here as well, but this is definitely better than everyone and anyone being able to see them off a website.Certain people trust websites like Facebook (www.facebook.com) to put up their photographs because the viewer ship is restricted to friends only. When asked, students had a similar take on this issue, as far as Facebook is concerned.“Yes, I am concerned about privacy issues and I don’t trust the websites,” said Azmat Ashraf. “But I think that it is relatively safer to put up photos on Facebook because only your friends can see them and not everyone else, unlike Orkut where whoever clicks on your profile, can see everything about you.”Rabya Ali agreed: “I think it is safe to put pictures on Facebook. I’m specifically talking about the pictures in my albums because only my friends can view those pictures. Putting up my picture made it easier for my old friends from school/college and elsewhere to recognise and contact me.”Once you find a website which suits you, another thing to bear in mind when putting up and sharing photos is that the photos must be of you only. You must absolutely make sure in this scenario that you only share photos of yourself. It would be an act of courtesy to respect your friend’s trust in you, by not putting up your friend’s photos online, irrespective of whether or not the concerned friend has an issue with it.So basically it is not just the privacy paranoia which has to reign. All that is needed is some vigilance rather than a lax attitude towards these so-called non-issues. If you take the necessary steps to ensure your privacy and security, and learn to go through the privacy policy of whichever website you are trusting to share your photographs, it would ultimately ensure that no one abuses or manipulates your photos. And at the end of the day, you can enjoy a hassle-free experience in cyberspace.