I don't know if many of you are aware, but there are some sick people who steal photos of children from people's photostreams on flickr and put sick profiles with them, things like "I'm Cupcake. I'm 5 years old, and single. I like oreos and walks on the beach" and all sorts of disturbing things. Even having your photos set to "no download" doesn't keep them safe from screen capture. The only safe way is to keep your photos friends and family only.

That is very creepy indeed. I do have a flickr account, but I have all my photos set to private on there. I don't do the groups or anything, so I am not too worried. Still, it's quite upsetting to think about sick pervs stealing photos of your children.

I make it a point to make sure all of my pics are for friends and family. Just anyone coming to my page doesn't see anything but my ugly mug. There are way too many sickos out there to trust people to respect anything you put online.

Chris

A friend of mine has his youtube videos set that he needs to share them before hand. Do these other sites have a similar option or does google just index anything nowadays?

I don't know about all the other sites, like photobucket and clipshack, but I know flickr is set up so you can set your pictures to private, so only you can see them, and private with permissions for your contacts, that you have labeled friends or family, and public. I believe the private ones cannot be indexed or crawled UNLESS you share them in a public group.

There should be an organization that just tracks down these sickos and prosecutes them. I don't use the photo services but I will pass this information on to the people that I know do use it. It's a sad world, that's for sure.

Well, I think this definitely falls under the category of child pornography and just recently I heard that the state of New York has passed some new laws and even has a special task force to go after these creeps. Personally speaking, I think these types of _astards should be put to sleep-permanently. They are also making the company responsible for the sites, if they have been warned about them and choose to do nothing about them. Now that type of stuff needs to go nationwide to protect our children from these creeps.

littlelizzy, it's sick, but it's not kiddie porn. These are children fully clothed (usually). But I do think that Orkut, which is owned by Google, should take action against these people. Most of the people doing it are in Brazil (nothing against Brazillians, there just most be a small portion of the population that is very bored and has a sick sense of humor). Some of the people who have been confronted or have seen the petitions floating around have responded with things like "what are you going to do to stop us? We are many, you are small".

Honestly by now anyone who puts a picture online knows they should expect it to be stolen. Nothing is sacred which is why if it means something to you it should be kept in a private album or soemthing of the sort.

I know Photobucket has private and guest settings. If you don't tag or name your pictures they can be hard to find from the search menu anyway. Making them private ensures they don't show up in the site search and I'd assume Google either.