Oh, the power. I miss the power, the power of negatives, those thin strips of transparent film, reverse photographs where everyone in my family wore blackface. The moment the camera shop’s fat, rectangular envelope of developed film touched my palm, a rush of security and superiority filled me. As long as I had the negatives safely in hand, the images were mine, all mine.
People used to pay big money to get their hands on the negatives, the smoking gun evidence of an affair, a drug deal, or a bad hair day. The familiar envelopes could be tucked away neatly and securely in a drawer or safe deposit box. Everyone slept better knowing exactly where the photos and negatives lived.
Not anymore. With camera phones and digital cameras, negatives have become irrelevant and photos can spread on the internet like wild fire. Half of the time I’m not sure where my photos are. Still on the camera or phone? On my thumb drive? On my laptop? On the media drive? Uploaded to Facebook? On a billboard in India? All of the above?
The power has shifted from owning photos and negatives to stealing photos. It’s not the negatives that you need to cling to like Gollum’s ring, it’s the precious photos themselves. Because really, it’s our very identities that are now up for grabs. Once a digital photo is released into the world, both devious and clueless minds can play all kinds of tricks with them.
My friend Michael recently emailed me a link to an Oakland non-profit’s new brochure “Putting the East Bay to Work—Sustainable Jobs for the Underemployed.” Smack-dab on the cover front and center is a photo of him on the phone, representing the underemployed customer service rep. He is surrounded by warehouse, lab, factory, and construction workers. The only problem is that Michael has held Director and VP positions for several years! He doesn’t even remember the photo being taken, much less signing a release form for them to use the photo. He had temped for the organization for a couple of days or weeks several years earlier. Someone must have thought he was cute, snapped a picture, and when it came time to design the handbook cover, picked it out of the photo morgue. Sure, at the time the photo was taken he was underemployed. Perhaps it just took more than five years for the agency to get around to finishing their handbook. But now his image is being used to represent a person that is not him.
He’s more amused by the whole situation than outraged. It’s a fairly harmless use of his photo. Not so much with another photo theft. My gay male friend X recently fell in love with man Y who was going through a tumultuous breakup with man Z. All three run in the same circles and Z was not happy that X got Y instead of him. So Z posted a personals ad on Craigslist’s Men4Men section, pretending to be my friend X. He included half a dozen photos of X, including a couple of close-ups of X’s face that he had pulled from a community website. He threw in a photo of a naked butt, which was not of X because X doesn’t post nude photos of himself online.
The ad contained a fairly accurate description of X’s age, height and weight, but also went into graphic detail about what X was supposedly looking for in terms of a sexual hookup(s). I think the ad could have been much worse. Z could have included hardcore photos of orifices and sexual acts alongside those of X’s face. It was bad enough that the ad included misspellings and dumb logic, saying he had to be discreet, and yet there were photos of his face. It made my friend sound like an idiot, let alone a slut.
Luckily with Craigslist, ads come and go so quickly that the imposter ad was soon buried in a pile of new postings. My friend decided to just let the ad and Z’s jealousy fizzle out instead of notifying the police or filing a complaint with the website.
Celebrities have long had their photos used and abused by tabloid magazines and now by online tabloid personalities like Perez Hilton who made his name by defacing celebrity photos. Some celebrities have had success with lawsuits against tabloids’ unauthorized use of photos, but complaints of high tech identity abuse have gone nowhere, especially for the little people. Judge Judy, while not exactly the pinnacle of judicial precedence, ruled that a male defendant had no grounds against the website hotghettomess.com. The site had found a photo of him online and used it as an example of a “hot ghetto mess” rather than the preferred “not ghetto mess.” He was pissed because he’s a college student, not a gang banger. But Judge Judy ruled that because the defendant had posted the photo online somewhere, it was public domain and he could not claim damages.
It’s gotten to the point where if you’re sharing photos online of a vacation, wedding or family gathering, you have to post them with a secure, password-protected service like http://www.keepandshare.com/ or Facebook, but in both of these cases, it all depends on whether you can trust your online friends. Hide Photos is a software product that can encrypt your digital photos. (Anyone have experience with any other secure photo-sharing sites?)
My former boss’s family did not use such a service. My tech-savvy administrative assistant on a former job googled the name of our very private and discreet project manager and found a public website created by his daughter-in-law. There were over a dozen photos of a family birthday party at his house, so we got a sense of his lifestyle plus saw photos of his son, his daughter, his wife. It made me uncomfortable to invade his privacy this way, but there it was.
The pop group No Doubt recently filed a lawsuit against Activision about how the group’s members are used in the new video game Band Hero. Players can use a character-manipulation feature and make the band’s avatars perform songs popularized by other bands. Activision is claiming that the band agreed to all features of the software and that it may not be possible to turn that feature off for the band anyway. Whatever the result of the lawsuit, the damage to their images is done. I can’t see that making Gwen Stefani sing “Kung Fu Fighting” compared to her own songs is that big a difference or tragedy, but it’s logical for the band to expect that No Doubt avatars would only be performing No Doubt songs. She should be grateful that you can’t make her sing any of the songs from her husband Gavin Rossdale’s solo album!
I could have told No Doubt that most technology and online agreements are about giving away the rights of your images. A friend sent out a cool Halloween e-card from jibjab.com. Many of their e-cards are customizable where you upload personal photos or videos that are incorporated into the card’s design. Of course, the best cards are for members only so I started to sign-up for the site to send out some birthday cards. Once I read their privacy policies, I cancelled the registration. The terms and conditions read in part:
If User chooses not to have his/her content, picture, video, or any other profile information about themselves viewable by a global audience, User should not use the JibJab Sites and JibJab Services.
User hereby grants to JibJab a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use: (i) User’s name(s), photograph and/or likeness(es) and biographical materials; and (ii) any other individual’s name, photograph and/or likeness and biographical materials, where such other individual appears in the User Materials, in connection with the distribution, exploitation, promotion, marketing and advertising of the User Materials, as described hereunder, during the Term.
At least they are upfront about the possibility of your images being exploited, whether by yourself or by others, but it gave me pause. I’m perhaps overly cautious. I don’t like having other people take my picture, partly because of vanity—if the photo doesn’t turn out well, I want to have control over who sees it online. Hence, most of my profile photos on Facebook, etc. are self-portraits.
My brother was concerned about my 18-year-old niece posting photos on Facebook that show her partying or being too sexy. To demonstrate to her the dangers of doing so, I thought of taking the photo of her in her Lady Gaga Halloween costume and PhotoShop-ing it to turn her into an obese Lady Goo-Goo Gai-Pan. Besides being lame, I ran the risk of her retaliating by taking a photo of me and doing something like this:
On the surface, it might not appear that I’m setting the greatest example with “Oh Dave Now” in which I have shared and will share very personal experiences and am posting my childhood photos. But my purpose with “Oh Dave Now” is to deliberately paint a candid personal portrait. Once I decide to post something personal, I can’t care about who reads it. Still, because of the lack of control of where it goes from here, I certainly hold back from revealing some information about myself. I deliberately restrict my posts to my experiences, in order to respect the privacy of those close to me. I do not always give the names of family members and friends who are part of my experience. I will only use their photos with their permission.
I believe that most people, like myself, go by the Golden Rule and don’t misuse others’ photos because they don’t want their own photos to be misused. If that doesn’t make you feel secure enough, then the rule is don’t post online what you wouldn’t want your employer to see or a newspaper to print. With photos, the power has always been, even with the old negatives, in keeping them close at hand. If I were to get really serious about this, I think I would keep a dedicated thumb drive or photo card in a safe deposit box.
Some African and Caribbean cultures believe that when a person’s photo is taken with a camera, they lose a part of their soul. In the digital age, let’s agree that it’s the one who steals and misuses someone else’s photos whose soul is lost.
That means you, Perez.
