Family privacy

I have a relative who works hard to maintain his privacy. He asks that there should be no photographs of him or his family on the open web. I use flickr for photographs. To accommodate him I had to persuade family members to do some work so that they could be marked as my family on flickr. This was only partially successful as for some it’s too much work or too much trouble. I know that I often stop pursuing anything sent to me if it involves a registration page.

I think that having public stuff on the internet is fine. It brings much more good than harm. I found my relative’s attitude strange.

At Spring break the rest of my immediate family went up to Sacramento by train. I put their photos up on flickr. Then weirdly one of those photos started to get huge (for me) numbers of hits. Four people marked it as a favorite. What was going on? The picture shows my pre-teen daughter holding up a glove she found. The glove looms in the foreground, it blocks most of the face, It’s a cute photo taken by the expert photographer in our family. It’s a leather glove. Was this some pervy thing? Some work revealed that someone posted the link to a community for people who like to see Women in Gloves, Boots and Leather.

This exceeded my comfort level. I marked the image on flickr as being for friends and family only. I don't think anything bad happened. But it did make me feel uncomfortable.