You Can't Use This

I’m really not sure what I should do because I feel like I’m being followed. Just yesterday somebody asked me about the symphony concert I had been to just two nights earlier. They weren’t even at the concert, but somehow they were able to know where I had been, who I was with and what I had been listening to. If this was an isolated incident I wouldn’t worry, but this stuff seems to be happening all the time.

In the last couple of years I had taken a whole bunch of pictures at two different family reunions and some trips that we had been on as a family. I had been busy so I hadn’t moved the photos to my external drives. But before they were lost I took some time at the end of last week and over the weekend to update the photos and move them into some electronic albums. Suddenly, people I didn’t even know were talking about these pictures that I had taken. Pictures that portrayed me, my family and the places we had traveled.

You can imagine my surprise that by simply putting these pictures on an album in Facebook that my wife’s cousin’s husband’s brother actually liked and commented on some of the photos that I had taken. I don’t even know this person and there he is writing underneath my photo about how nice it was to see my wife’s cousin and that he hoped all was well with them. It was worse than the graffiti that I see on our downtown buildings.

Other commentators chose another picture to mock another of my wife’s cousins husband. He was talking with another cousin and people were telling the one cousin not to listen to the other and going on about how he likes to give everyone advise.

I tell you, there really ought to be a law, something like the Uniform Commercial Code or perhaps the Rome statute that would keep people from looking at photos that I put up on my very own private wall, a wall I share with 1023 others. But I never gave anyone of them any right to disclose, copy, distribute my profile and/or it's contents. This is all content that I have worked so hard to create, and to think that people are just freely viewing it at their own leisure and commenting on it just makes me sick. It is highway robbery.

What ever happened to the sense of privacy that we used to have? People didn’t used to be able to just look up my name and then find out where I lived and what my actual phone number was. I could enjoy my privacy. It truly is a pity that I’ve had to connect with old friends who turned out to know some of the same people I know, but neither of us knew it.

If I find anyone using my information without my permission, I just might sue. And I’m a lawyer.