Do you have the right to post photos of someone if you suspect them of stealing your stuff?
So Katy McCaffrey’s iPhone was stolen on a Disney Cruise in April. She thought the phone was just gone… Until her iCloud started downloading photos automatically to her home computer. Images of one guy, a Disney cruise employee wearing a name tag, feature prominently in McCaffrey’s stolen phone slideshow.
So McCaffrey decided to share the album on Facebook, which ended up being shared by others over 500 times.
While nobody can blame McCaffrey for publicizing the photos and asking people to help, including Disney Cruise Lines, not everyone is super psyched about McCaffrey’s assumption that the guy in the photos, Nelson, is in fact the thief. According to NPR:
We haven’t been able to independently verify all the details of McCaffrey’s story; both she and Disney have yet to respond to requests for comment. And while her creative photo captions make the album compelling, they don’t include any proof that the man named Nelson was involved with her phone’s disappearance. As a post over at New York magazine notes, it’s possible that the situation might involve at least one misunderstanding.
Technology has a lot of built-in safeguards, including this whole auto-upload of photos business. But GPS has helped find even more lost and stolen phones and iPads. Including this one, according to NPR.org:
…in March, police found $35 million worth of crystal meth when they arrived at an apartment to investigate a stolen iPad, whose GPS system was alerting its owner to its whereabouts.
What do you think of this method of hunting down your stolen goods? If this dude, Nelson, isn’t the thief, is this a violation of his privacy?
So there is some doubt here? There are pictures of his girlfriend laying in bed. If it isn’t Nelson then his girlfriend is cheating on him. And if you doubt it is his girlfriend just look up his Facebook page to see a picture of the two of them.
I don’t really have an issue with doing this, you reap what you sow and all that, but I would do it as a method of last resort. In this case, the photos gave her the name of the thief, and his employer, so she could easily have gone to the police, or to Disney Cruise before taking this route.
If I “found” an iphone I wouldn’t start taking pics I would turn it in. Are the photos her property because they are on her phone and uploaded to her computer?
It would be one thing if she had taken the photos to the police only but I agree that just sharing them under the presumption that he is the thief isn’t right. Just like a year or so ago at a college campus when student learned that a friend of hers was allegedly raped. Instead of going to the police she publicly called the man as a rapist with name and photo across campus (and I think she even put it up on facebook). In either case if it turned out the publicly accused were guilty the accusers would quickly… Read more »
I do believe it is invasion of privacy especially since there is some doubt this the guy who stole her camera. It “COULD” also be that no one stole her camera, that she left it behind.