For the second time in the last few weeks, a loved one posted pictures of my son online without my permission. Neither person involved thought anything of it but that they love my son and wanted to share happy memories with their friends. Unfortunately, our culture has embraced technologies without understanding them, and there is *huge* social pressure not only to share intimate details of our lives online, but to think nothing of sharing others' info.

In other words, everyone assumes it's not a problem because everyone else assumes it's not a problem.

Both times, I've gotten angry responses from loved ones who feel that I am just being mean. So, for the information of everyone who knows me, here's why you should never post anyone's picture without their (or their parent's) permission.

• It's against the law. In the US, and some other places, it is illegal to publish a photo of an identifiable person without a signed release from that person. If you do it, you are subject to civil action where a court can order damages as it sees fit. If you released the photo (despite having no right to) under a license that allows others to use that photo, you are also liable for anything that other parties do with the photo.
• You have taken away someone else's right to choose who has their picture. It's simply not your right. Once a photo is on the internet, there is really no getting it back. If you care about the people in your photos, do the right thing and give them a choice.
• You don't know what the consequences will be. You don't know if the person you are posting pictures of has a stalker that may use them for nefarious purposes. You don't know if that person has worked with law enforcement in criminal matters that garner them ill will from bad people. You don't know if a pedophile will grab some innocent kid's picture and (with or without touching it up to look more suggestive or less clothed) and spread it around to his fellows. You don't know if someone will grab the picture and use it in an ad campaign. You don't know if there's a custody dispute, and you are fueling court issues about how much candy the kid is allowed to eat or how late she stays up. If it's on the internet, it's out there for everyone to see, copy, and re-post anywhere they feel like it. You don't know if someone who doesn't have a stalker or work with law enforcement now, may be in one of those situations six months from now.
• Facebook is NEVER private. Let's say that Alice posts a picture of her kid to Facebook (set to "friends only"). Her friend, Bob looks at the picture and comments on how cute it is. Because of Bob's comment, all of Bob's friends can now see the picture (even if they are not Alice's friends). Bob's friend Carol also think's it's cute, so she comments, too. Now Carol's coworker, David, can see the picture. After David comments, everyone who knows him, including the mentally disturbed cousin he never talks about, can see it. It goes on forever.

  What's worse is that Bob and Carol like to take quizzes and play games on Facebook. Every time they click through the warning about giving a Facebook app their profile info, they are not just giving out all of the info that they have in Facebook, but all of Alice's and David's information that they have access to as well. Mallory created a Facebook quiz to tell you what flower you are most like. Mallory is also a pedophile. Because Bob just had to find out that he's a rhododendron at heart, his quiz-taking habit has given pictures of Alice's child to Mallory.1 MySpace, Flickr, and other social networking sites are the same -- they are great at disseminating information, so great that once something is on one of these sites it can never really be limited or eliminated.

• Who is going to go to some obscure corner of the internet to find my pictures? They no longer need to. Image search and analysis tools are growing in speed and quality every day. An automated program can search a few million sites, find countless pictures, edit them, and post them to another web site in a matter of minutes. Or, it can quietly sift through Facebook and Myspace...

1. 1. There are ways to stop some of this information flow by setting more restrictive Facebook settings, but you can't stop half of it, and most people never change the defaults.