I’m happy to continue to guest-blog, and as always my posts don’t represent the views of Reputation.com or any of its defenders employees (the lawyers still say I can’t use that word).

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Today’s post is about unintentional ways in which Internet users might be opening themselves up to having their privacy violated. This isn’t a case where anybody has done anything wrong, but rather a case where not everybody realizes that their pictures are automatically spread all over the Internet.

The social blogging site LiveJournal is pretty neat: It lets people write their own social diaries, or connect with others and blog in communities. One of the most popular features of LiveJournal is that it’s possible to limit access to a particular blog entry (or an entire journal) to “friends only” (commonly called “FOB” for “friends only basis”). A lot of other people just rely on obscurity to keep their journals private; they don’t advertise the URL or direct anybody but their friends to the site.

LiveJournal does a pretty good job with privacy overall. But many users don’t realize that a common “feature” might be compromising their privacy. LiveJournal publishes a feed (RSS here) of all the most recent updates to any public journal on the site. One application that has been written to take advantage of it is a web page that allows any user on the Internet to see the most recent 250 images posted to any journal on LiveJournal by any user (other versions have the “Last 100 LiveJournal Images” instead).

The most recent images feed is interesting in that it gives a very quick overview of the zeitgeist of the site. A lot of the images are references to TV shows, LOLcats, current events (today was the Pennsylvania Presidential primary, so there are no shortage of Clinton and Obama images), and other benign trivia. A social anthropologist could spend years deconstructing the feed to identify what people care enough about to post to LiveJournal.

But, there’s a dark side. A few of the images revealed by the Last 250 LiveJournal Images feature are clearly things that were meant to be kept private. There are candid photos of intimate moments, illustrations of private confessions, revelations about body image issues, pictures of drug use, and more. Many users put these very personal photos on their LiveJournal pages thinking that only their friends will see them, and don’t realize that they’ll be broadcast to anybody watching the image feed. They just don’t know that by posting an image to their personal journal it’s instantly broadcast to anybody watching.

Even worse, a malicious (or at least juvenile) user could take any very private image from the Most Recent Images feed and spread it to others. It’s possible to copy any image and republish it across the Internet. Any image can be spread by message board, by email, or even by another LiveJournal page. One LiveJournal user’s very private confession or intimate moment could instantly become fodder for web mockery; all too many Internet memes started with something personal that became a topic of mockery. For example, look at what happened to the “Star Wars Kid”: A fourteen year old student filmed a silly (and somewhat embarassing) video of himself swinging a fake lightsaber, his classmates found the tape and published it on the Internet, and the student became the subject of worldwide mockery. The video has been viewed more than 10 million times on YouTube alone.

It could happen just as fast with an image posted to LiveJournal that’s accidentally revealed through the image feed.

If you’re a LiveJournal user, here’s how to prevent (“turn off” or “opt out” from) your images from appearing in the image feed:

1. Log into LiveJournal
2. Go to the LiveJournal command console (this is different than your “settings” page)
3. Enter the command:
   set latest_optout yes
4. Press “execute”

This will remove your images from the Most Recent Images feed.

One of the dangers of these social sites is that, by default, they tend to share a lot of information about you. It’s great if you’re interested in meeting new people, but it also creates a huge risk that your privacy is being violated without you even knowing it. Check to make sure that other sites aren’t also using your information in ways that you don’t expect.