Photo Tagging as a Privacy Problem? 143
An anonymous reader writes "The Harvard Law Review, a journal for legal scholarship, recently published a short piece on the privacy implications of online photo-tagging (pdf). The anonymously penned piece dourly concludes that 'privacy law, in its current form, is of no help to those unwillingly tagged.' Focusing on the privacy threat from newly emergent automatic facial recognition search engines', like Polar Rose but not Flickr or Facebook, the article states that 'for several reasons, existing privacy law is simply ill-suited for this new invasion.' The article suggests that Congress create a photo-tagging opt-out system, similar to what they did with telemarketing calls and the Do-Not-Call Registry." How would you enforce such a registry, though?
"remove tag" (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Simply put.. (Score:4, Informative)
I mean among friends this wasn't exactly unusual in the paper days. You have a picture from the New Year's Eve party, flip it over and it says "Joe, Bob and Anne drinking champagne". The trouble comes when this isn't some private photo album, it's something published and tagged and tracable to you. And unlike other info online you can pretty easily tell if this is the same guy you're considering hiring or not. Of course, you might say it's only the truth or whatever. But if you haven't done anything in your life you'd not very proud off like getting completely drunk and... well then you haven't lived enough.
Re:I was under the assumption (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Simply put.. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:"remove tag" (Score:4, Informative)
I've untagged photos of myself before. Unless someone were to place these photos on, say, flickr, where I have no presence, I can control when I am tagged.
In the information-rich anarchy of the web, privacy is a dying hope. Anywhere you can be seen in public can be recorded, labelled, stored, distributed, and more. It's possible to hide, but it's getting harder.