Koppie Koppieis not a business selling photos of your children, it's not even a real commercial enterprise. Instead, it's a social experiment, as the website's owners, Dimitri Tokmetzis, and journalist and co-founder Yuri Veerman, call it.
It is a social experiment aimed at raising awareness about privacy in the age of social media, as they say.
They use photos of children from all over the world to make money. They print them on coffee mugs and distribute them through their website. It may sound creepy and illegal, but the Koppie Koppie duo can do it perfectly legally within the confines of Flickr's services.
This can be done because the photos of children and babies they use (sometimes shown with their parents) are marked with the Creative Commons licensing mark, which gives them the right for further commercial use.
In an article published on Medium, Tokmetzis explains that Koppie Koppie intentionally violates the privacy of children and their families, but not in the legal sense of the term.
Media platforms like Flickr (owned by Yahoo), Instagram and Snapchat, along with Facebook and Google, are constantly changing the “context” in which we share information, Tokmetzis said.
When we share information with our doctor or a close friend, we have a reasonable expectation that the information will not be shared.
But social media is changing our expectation of privacy in complex ways that we don't always realize.
Even though we may have carefully set up security on Facebook and limited who can see our updates and photos, our privacy is still dependent on Facebook and our network of friends who don't respect our wishes.
Many people don't fully understand how these companies can use their data and content for profit.
Tokmetzis says that Facebook, Flickr and other social media companies promise control but fail to fully explain the context for how and in what ways public information can be shared with others.
The Koppie Koppie may be creepy because it involves children, but it seems to motivate many to be careful about what they upload to social media.
Koppie Koppie administrators promise that they will take down every photo upon request from parents within two weeks.
Source: secnews.gr
