This applies to your job search, family photos, embarrassing music, nude photos, and just about anything else. If you don't want it to be seen by the world, don't share it. At the end of the day, your privacy is your responsibility.
This "well the future just sucks, DEAL WITH IT!" mentality that I see parroted here on HN so often is disgusting.
Online is broken. Let's fix it, and let's champion anybody else who is trying to fix it.
* Make the browser technology slightly less happy to assume that displaying a picture means that the viewer has all the rights to download it for his/hers own use. Take out "Save Image As...", perhaps if a "private" attribute is set on the image.
* Make Facebook technology display more clearly what is the audience of a given item. Yeah, that means spelling in clear if the image is available for advertisers as well.
Given this little two steps, "accidentally" posting a private image to Twitter becomes less of an excuse. You took the action of taking a screen snapshot (or camera pic) of something explicitly labeled as private and posted it for a public audience. That sucks and may be even be grounds for legal action under copyright law.
Or camera phone video of you doing something totally legal, like badmouthing 47% of the country to your friends at a dinner.
== & That's why we cant have nice things
if you put something on the internet, assume that everyone
will see it and know it's you. It's as simple as that.
Privacy on the internet is definitely a hard problem. Don't dismiss it because you have a simplistic perspective and trust other companies to understand that you don't want to have a presence on the internet. They don't care.
I guess that's one approach. Personally, I'm always aware there is a risk that the things I put online will be publicly exposed at some point, but I treat it like any other risk: I evaluate the likelihood that it will happen, and make decisions from there. I don't think that risk can ever be zero, but there are ways to make it smaller, and I think that's the perspective most people are coming from.
There is.
And by that I mean that it seems very hard to make anything private on the Internet, and it's becoming increasingly harder, instead of easier.
I think there's opportunity here for start-ups to solve this problem to allow you to better control privacy on the Internet. And when I say controlling privacy on the Internet, I mean keeping it private from the company itself, the users you don't want to share with, and government, too.