The more I learn in our Web Media class, the more apprehensive I become about using my Bebo page. It’s amazing what personal information can be made public via the internet. It seems that every tool we learn to use in class, while being useful to our studies, has the flipside of being a stalkers dream. We learn how to have the comments a person has left somewhere fed directly to our computer along with photos, news and topics. Obviously there are systems in place to try and protect this information being accessed by any old one but it’s amazing how many out there don’t seem to care how and what they are letting float freely about the world wide web. Especially on Flickr, with the amount of amazing photos that people are letting randoms have full access to. If they’re not careful they could end up with their snaps on a billboard, no credit due to them. 15-year old Alison Chang from Dallas found this out the hard way when she appeared in Adelaide on a Virgin mobile billboard, innocently posing for a photo from a church carwash. Her youth Pastor, Justin Wong, had uploaded the photo to Flickr with a Creative Commons licensed. This mean’t the photo could be used by anyone as long as he was credited. Virgin had done this with Wong’s Flickr address at the bottom of the ad, so was in no way breaching copyright. Easy, huh?
