I’ve had an account on social media site Deviant Art for a while now, but I only recently found the time to start uploading some photographs – of landscapes, buildings etc – to showcase them. One of the things that struck me about the submissions policy is that you basically sign away the copyright to your work while ever it appears on the site, allowing Deviant Art the right to use your work in in any way it chooses, for example for an exhibition of members’ work (they do promise to ask your permission first, but it appears to be only a formality).
The site itself is pretty easy to use, although it doesn’t seem to want to let me put emoticons in my comments on other people’s submissions or pages – somehow I feel deprived by this. Otherwise everything worked first time (which I find to be a rarity). One spooky feature is that as soon as I posted my first photograph, a link appeared at the bottom right of the screen offering anyone viewing the submission the ability to buy the camera I use – spooky considering I uploaded the photo from my laptop rather than directly from the camera itself.
The site itself is pretty easy to use, although it doesn’t seem to want to let me put emoticons in my comments on other people’s submissions or pages – somehow I feel deprived by this. Otherwise everything worked first time (which I find to be a rarity). One spooky feature is that as soon as I posted my first photograph, a link appeared at the bottom right of the screen offering anyone viewing the submission the ability to buy the camera I use – spooky considering I uploaded the photo from my laptop rather than directly from the camera itself.
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ReplyDeleteI found the last piece of this post about the computer knowing what camera the picture came from very unsettling! It's smacks of 1984 and just shows how much we are monitored in terms of the technology we use and our habits etc.
ReplyDeleteIt can only get worse and the only way we can protect ourselves,is to educate ourselves.
Digital images can contain a lot of meta-data. Typically this is (for photos) the exposure time, the aperture, the camera-type, and (if available, ie through GPS-enabled smartphone cameras) the coordinates.
ReplyDeleteThis can be quite useful, as you can look at this data yourself (eg in Apple's iPhoto software, and probably also in Adobe Lightroom or whatever other photo software you use). The key is that this data is not secretly encoded, but openly included. You can probably remove it somehow, if you wanted.
But you have to be aware of it, and especially the coordinates are potentially dangerous when accessible to everybody.