Photo thieves on Orkut
A bunch of creepy weirdos are stealing people’s photos of their children from Flickr and posting them on Orkut, a social networking site. The thieves are setting up fake accounts for the children so other weird lonely people can add them to their friends. Many of the pictures being stolen are copyrighted so the thieves can’t download them. Instead they’re taking screenshots and saving them to their computers and uploading them to Orkut.
You can read more about the thefts and the ick-factor of it all from mothers who learned their children’s photos were used here and here. You need to be an Orkut member to see profiles, but here’s one of the actual fake profiles featuring someone’s little girl.
Orkut, owned by Google, has not responded to any complaints about the picture thieves and fake profiles even though their user policy says you must be 18 years old to create a profile. If you’re outraged or sickened like I am, please go here and see how you can help. If you are a member of Digg please Digg this story so it gets the attention it deserves. And here’s a petition to shut down Orkut, a site that refuses to help parents who demand their children’s pictures be removed.
This makes me sick. I’ve just privatized my more than 2000 photos on Flickr. I suggest that you do too.
Leave a Reply