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Wednesday, December 24, 2014

How to share family photos safely


From embracing analogue technology to learning how to use privacy settings on Facebook, here are some tips to keep your pictures from being too public

Kodak Pocket Instamatic camera and film, 1972.
One way to go private is to use a camera that takes film. Photograph: Science & Society Picture Librar/Getty Images

GO ANALOGUE

The most reliable way to avoid creating a social media profile of your child is to embrace analogue technology. That is, buy a film camera (lots of bargains on eBay), get the photos processed at your local Snappy Snaps (if it hasn’t closed down) and put them in an album (Muji do nice ones). You can then take the album to social occasions and “update” your “friends” by showing them photographs of Oscar’s first steps and whatnot. They will be able to “comment” and “like” the photographs, but their comments won’t be permanently recorded on the internet, Oscar will be out reach of facial recognition technology and his steps won’t be turned into data points for multinationals or governments.
Upside Doesn’t require the memorising of any passwords, involve the ongoing management of privacy settings or increase the likelihood that an extremely large number of people will be privy to your intimate family moments.
Downside A roll of colour film and processing starts at about £8. You can’t put movies in an analogue album. Leaving the album on the bus would constitute a lapse in privacy settings.

DROPBOX

The cloud storage service allows you to share photo albums with non-Dropboxusers, however you have to upgrade to “Pro” to password protect those links and to have the ability to revoke access to an individual.
Upside Simple set-up. Very difficult to mistakenly share something. No adverts.
Downside The Pro service is £7.99 per month. Not recommended by Edward Snowden who described it as “hostile to privacy”. He recommends Spideroakwhich employs a “zero-knowledge” system to protect your data from snoopers and hackers. The service operates much like Dropbox although password-protected sharing is possible using a free account.

some bad press, however if you take the right precautions it is an option worth considering. Moreover if you’re not a famous actress (sorry about that) you’re less likely to be targeted by hackers.
From iPhoto > Preferences > Photo Stream you can switch on “Shared photo stream”. You can create one or more photo streams and share them with iCloud members and also with non-members, although the latter won’t be able to comment on your pictures.

It is pretty straightforward to remove and add pictures to the stream and also revoke access to a subscriber if you so wish. You can use this function without enabling My Photo Stream which was the feature that created embarrassing problems for those actresses. iPhoto does include a default facial recognition feature called Faces but if you stubbornly refuse to name people it is not going to learn anything.
Apple is replacing iPhoto with Photo for Mac in 2015 but the Shared Photo Stream feature will remain.
Upside Simple to set-up, free if you already have iPhoto installed and an iCloud account (which you may be paying for depending on your storage needs). A good option if you already use iPhoto to store and organise your photographs.
Downside Only works on Macs, although you can share with non-Mac users.


FACEBOOK

If you must
use Facebook, here’s how to set it up. First, click on the little padlock icon on the top right. Choose Privacy and set Who can see my stuff? to Friends and also Limit Past Posts – this restricts old posts to Friends which were previously posted using Facebook’s Friends of Friends setting. Next within Timeline and Tagging, anything about reviewing tags choose On, anything about who can see stuff select Friends. Also, keep an eye on the final option which is about Facebook’s face recognition technology automatically tagging anyone in your photographs – when this becomes available, opt out.
It is wise to purge your friends list to remove randoms you have met in bars, old school friends you never liked anyway and all the other sub-acquaintances. This will reduce your number but scientists say anything more than 150 friends is just silly anyhow.
Then create a Friends List of people with whom you are comfortable sharing family photographs. (You might want to name this list yourself rather than filling out the Family and Close Friends labels F
Something to bear in mind with all of these web options is that once a photo is online it can be downloaded or screen-grabbed by anyone with access to it, who might then distribute it, upload it to another site, alter it and/or use it for a grubby and/or illegal purpose. Even if you set them up correctly the security of these services is dependent on the trustworthiness and technical expertise of the people you share with.
Also, a hybrid option could be to continue using your digital image capturing device but save and edit all your photos locally on your hard drive using iPhoto or Windows My Pictures, then print them and create an analogue album. This avoids putting your pictures online which is the source of these concerns rather than digital photography per se.
acebook provides – do you want to tell FB to know who your nearest and dearest are? Let their algorithms try to figure it out.)
Then next time you post a photo of Esme with her cat, click on the little head and shoulders icon next to the date and select this friend list from the drop-down menu. You must remember to do this each time. And don’t add location info.
Upside Sharing is simple and quick.
Downside You can only share with people who have Facebook accounts. You have to be vigilant about sharing with all your friends or all users by accident, and be alert to the site’s changing privacy policy. Facebook’s current business model involves harvesting as much data about you and your child as possible and you may not be comfortable with this.

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