Having worked with both schools and Adventure Guides in leadership and technical advisory roles I have persistently encountered significant hurdles with how to handle the images of children. Organizations face the need to balance the protection of children with the parents’ ability to share photos with family members and close friends.
Historically photographs of school or club activities could be shared physically without concern for the safety or privacy of other children in the images. With the advent of digital photography this physical sharing was replaced with electronic sharing, however privacy and safety was only minimally affected because sharing was typically done via email or through password protected photography sites.
The advent of social networking brought about several changes. The first was the concept that photos could be easily shared out to friends and family without requiring them to register at photography sites and the second was the identifying information was being added to photos via status updates and tagging, the searchable identification of people in the photographs. Parents became enchanted with the idea of both sharing and viewing photos of their children online.
In discussion of social networking it is important to examine Facebook, initially based around photographs and built of many closed networks. By having closed networks Facebook implicitly recognized the danger of sharing photos outside closed social networks. Unfortunately Facebook moved away from this closed model and in the process also, possibly intentionally, made selecting correct privacy settings difficult. Facebook remains a very popular photo-sharing social network and many organizations have had to request and even caution their members not to post photographs of events for fear of impacting the safety of other children in the organization.
We are now faced with a serious problem. Parents, not organizational leaders, are impinging on the privacy and safety of children in the organization and, as a result, there is no effective way for the organization to enforce any policies or procedures on photo sharing. There are three paths that can be taken. First the organization can bury its head in the sand, leaving parents to police themselves and hopefully eliminate any legal, if not moral, culpability. They may however need to prohibit parental photography at sponsored events. Second the organization can publicize policies and educate parents on privacy and safety concerns in the hopes of preventing a future tragedy. Third the organization can put in place a system for parents to use such that privacy and safety of children can be preserved to the best extent possible.
Such a system has to be based around a strong authentication system that permits photo sharing with the organization and also within subgroups. Second the system must attempt to automate some of the process of identifying photos that should not be shared as well as tracking how the photos are being shared. Third the system must give parents the reasonable ability to block the use of images of their children when those images have the possibility of infringing on the privacy or security of their children. In addition it should permit parents to track the use of any images. Fourth the system must provide a way for the owner of the image to control and perhaps monetize the image.
I am hoping that Google Apps addition of Picasa will provide a good base for such a system. Google Apps already provides a strong account management system and Picasa already provides facial recognition based tagging. An organization would additionally need to build a database of opt-out images to prevent the public sharing of an image with those persons. Parents interested in opting out would additionally bear the responsibility of policing the images to ensure that tagging was being carried out correctly. While these parents will object that they should not be required to perform this action, the counter argument is that without them putting forth this effort there is little likelihood that other parents will be policing the images they choose to share.
A layer on top of the photo viewing system should also be provided to easily permit image sharing. This functionality would restrict sharing of images tagged with people from the restricted database without specific consent and caution on images with untagged people, which could be provided electronically. It would also maintain a record of how each image was shared. The same layer could be used by the organization to retrieve consent for image use in published material or websites and to provide commercial options for restricted use photos.
Advanced functionality would enforce policies regarding personal information in publicly shared images or provide warnings when status messages accompanying images contained information perceived to threaten the safety or privacy of the subjects.
Organizations would do well to establish a defacto photo repository for members to assist in the management of the safety and privacy of child images. Google has been extensively marketing their Apps environment for the education market would do well to look at how organizations can be assisted in protecting their children.