Photo Tagging as a Privacy Problem?

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?

Comments

"remove tag"

[SpeedyDX]

I didn't RTFA, admittedly, but there's a "remove tag" link on Facebook. A lot of people I know use it, and just ask their friends not to tag them. It does the job well enough. And if that doesn't do it, there are privacy settings that can prevent anyone other than yourself or a specific group of people (friends/network/etc) from seeing the photos.

Re:"remove tag"

[Andrew Kismet]

Facebook notifies you in your mini-feed whenever you are tagged, and also emails you if you set it up to do so (as I do).
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.

Re:Simply put..

[Kjella]

We're not talking about self-tagged images here. What happens is that Bob, which you barely know ran around taking pictures at some social gathering. Maybe he's one of those friends who likes to make "party pictures". Then Bob uploads those pictures to myspace or facebook or whatever, and tag them with the names of the people present. Then suddenly you find a picture of yourself in a pirate hat drinking an unspecified liquid with the subtitle "Drunken pirate" and don't get your teaching degree or whatever.

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

[Sunburnt]

The big fucking deal isn't the picture itself, but the connection of the picture with your name. I don't mind that unknown people can find pictures with my unlabeled self in the frame by poking around websites relevant to my hobbies. I DO mind, however, if a simple search for my real name can present the searcher with a look into my private life because some "friend" feels it necessary to catalogue the names of everyone in their photos.

Re:Simply put..

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, admittedly, torture-loving Daniel Teichman of Orange County is only 16 at the moment, so I'm sure his grossly immature attitude will come back to haunt him when he's 18 or 19 and looking for a job. Oh, and please don't bother his father, Dore Teichman. He's a performance engineer for IBM in Miami--we wouldn't want to disturb him simply because his son was being obnoxious. And BTW, isn't it some sort of crime to put false information in a domain registry listing? Sure would hate for someone to go after Daniel Teichman for that.