No more pictures

There is a reason I don't take pictures at public gatherings any more. Nat put up some videos on YouTube of woman in chainmail. All the pictures she made the videos out of were already on the internet. However, by puting them on YouTube, people were able to find them much easier. We got a bunch of frantic phone calls from two different women for her to take the videos down.

This really pisses me off. There is a backlash of people getting busted because of the pictures on Facebook and other sites. There have been stories on the BBC and U. S. media about people getting in trouble. Some student was reprimanded for pictures she put up on her  Facebook site that showed her violating some penny-anny rule about conduct. Her privacy settings were such that only other students and select friends could see the pictures. That means either the university got a current student to track her pictures down, or someone lied about their status to view her profile. Either way, she got yelled at.

There was another story about a real criminal putting up video of breaking in to someone's house. Some kid also put up a video of him beating a dog. Some group of teens here in Houston got in trouble over having a toddler in a van without a car seat or seat belt and joking that the little girl was on the drug ecstasy. There are real criminals to worry about for goodness sake. Get off people who show their ass after fifteen beers.

I hope the women who got hold of us today about Nat's videos have learned a lesson. I may just type up a disclaimer for people to sign that says they cannot bitch about future events that bite them in the ass over pictures on my site. That may hold up in court, but I already don't get invited to people's parties. That wouldn't help.

As much as I love photography, It has become the bane of existence. It is too easy to capture an image of people doing stupid shit and it ending up on their boss's screen. People just need to get over it. people are going to do things they are not proud of. They always have. We can't all live lie Mother Teressa. I wonder how many really saintly people from history would loose their luster if we had pictures of the weekend they spent getting sloshed, stripped, painted purple by their buddies and tied to a donkey until they said uncle the next morning? Not too many I imagine.

It won't be that long from now before all activities on the street are available on the internet to any one. London, New York and any number of other cities have cameras all over the place. Right now they are in the name of law enforcement, but who is to say what they will be used for tomorrow.

If I put cameras on my house and aim them at public areas, I'm not sure my neighbors can do much about it. I would want to catch drug deals across the street. The racers blowing by at 150 mph would look nice to the cops. I wonder if there is a market for interesting web-cams any more. The only ones that made any money in the past were pornographic I bet.