Your Digital Life

A new report in Mother Jones suggests that the popular photo site Shutterfly has some serious security holes. It’s worth reading the whole piece for a sense of the issue, but here’s a snippet: This spring, with millions of kids across the United States participating in sports leagues and other activities, coaches and harried parents are [...]

The business networking site LinkedIn has joined the long list of social networking sites that will use your photographs for advertising purposes. Naked Security provides the details: Crudely put, LinkedIn will mine your usage habits to determine what products and services you’re interested in, and then use your name and photo in what amounts to [...]

One of the reasons we argued against using Facebook for photo-sharing is that it’s sophisticated facial tagging and facial recognition technology is a potential risk to your privacy. Now a new study from Carnegie Mellon shows just how facial recognition can reveal you: The team ran three experiments and developed one mobile phone application. In [...]

We like to highlight photo contests here at YDL, since one of the great things you can do with your photos and videos is win prizes for them. But, just as with online photo sites, you have to worry about the fine print. Hidden in the legalese is important information that any contest entrant needs [...]

If you’re shooting photos with a smartphone or with a select few digital cameras (mostly from Nikon) and camcorders (from Sony), you may be capturing more than you think. Many smartphones and quite a few other imaging devices have built-in GPS receivers that record your location while you shoot. These coordinates – called “geotags” – [...]

Earlier in the week we took note of Facebook’s new facial regonition algorithm that makes it easier to tag photos and identify people in them. Privacy advocates weren’t all that pleased, but it’s worth pointing out that even without facial recognition you are surrendering your privacy and the security of your photos by posting them [...]

According to the privacy site Sophos, Facebook has quietly updated their privacy settings on their site to enable “facial recognition.” Essentially what happens is this: after Facebook’s facial recognition algorithm gets going, it will remember faces in photos that were tagged with specific names. If in later photo uploads from your family and friends it [...]

Think the photos you’re uploading to social networking sites like Twitter and Flickr are yours? They’re not. According to a report from The Next Web, sites like Twitpic, picplz, Color, yFrog, Instagram,Flickr, and Lockerz (fka Plixi) all stipulate that they have the right to use your photos for their commercial gain. Of course, this isn’t usually stipulated up front when [...]

Another day, another revelation about online privacy (or lack thereof). Today’s news is that Facebook users’ personal info may have been leaked to third parties, including advertisers, over the past “few years” according to the security firm Symantec. The firm estimated that close to 100,000 applications were “enabling this leakage” of personal information, including your [...]

It sounds obvious, to be sure, but a recent study funded by wireless memory card maker Eye Fi confirms that people really value their photographs: after saving their loved ones from a house fire, 53 percent of respondents said they would save their family photos above all other possessions. That’s significantly higher than the second [...]