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Question for Admin
Knowing that are merverts, trolls and other slithering creatures on the internet makes one skin crawl.
How do you protect yourself, your identity, your photos and videos from being stolen or used without permission? Is there any protection what so ever whether on this forum or the internet?
Suggestions?
Is this forum even 'locked' to prevent guests from viewing photos or videos? I would feel rather creeped out uploading videos and photos on this forum knowing guests can access them as they could be anyone.
Is anywhere or anything safe for a mer and their content?
Thank you.
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With respect to your question about this forum, pictures are viewable to non-members. I don't think its possible for us to change the forum settings to make pictures invisible to non-members. Even if that were possible it would offer limited protection since anyone can register and become a member.
As for the larger question of whether its possible to protect images on the internet, there are best practices that can help, but at the end of the day there's no silver bullet for protecting your identity and your images online. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong (and I hope I am), but controlling that sort of thing is very difficult.
To be more specific, some of the privacy threats you face on the internet are the following:
- merverts getting off on people's photos
- people reusing your images and other intellectual property
- companies selling your data to advertisers
- governments tracking and profiling you
- friends/acquaintances/enemies/employers finding information you did not wish to share with them
The response to each of these is different. With images being reused, it may or may not violate copyright. If it does, you might be able to enforce the copyright, although I'm not sure the best way to do that. Raina might know. With merverts saving photos, as chilling as it is I don't think there's anything you can do to stop someone from right clicking and hitting "save image". With respect to having people stumble onto your information, you can set facebook accounts and other social networking profiles to private, but to be honest that's still extremely leaky at best. For governments and advertisers, there's not much you can do. I guess you can use the tor network to anonymize your internet traffic so websites can't track your IP address.
Anyway, the short answer is that there are things you can do to protect your privacy but none of them are very reliable.
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All I can say is when you take a picture on your phone, you should make sure your Geo-tagging feature is off.
You can also put your website on your images that way it can be harder for someone to steal them.
And I doubt the government would be tracking you all that close unless they suspected you doing something terrorist-related, right? I think that would be their main purpose of doing that. I'm probably ignorant in that area...
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I've always just go by the rule of thumb that if you post it on the internet, even if it's in a supersecret closed forum....it's out there for the world. I post all pictures with this in mind. If I don't want it out there, I don't post it.
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Seconding Sherielle here. The sad fact of the internet is that if it's out there, it's out there. If you don't want pictures shared beyond a certain group, please don't post them. The nature of mermaiding and mermaids (very pretty, visually appealing, cool underwater photography, etc) lends to it going viral. People are always trying to add watermarks (they get removed) or credited for images or pictures (once a pretty pic hits something like tumblr or pinterest though, it takes off on its own most of the time.) At that point it's just damage control, and putting yourself out there so that you're well known enough that someone connects the mermaid with the person behind it.
Don't post your personal info (last name, first name if it's unusual, school details, hometown, etc.) If you really want to avoid being doxxed you should make different profiles for different sites, and be very vague with details when relating anecdotes or what have you.
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everything I think about this topic has already been posted in the threads on merverts and safety :)
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