I'm putting this here, under Hair and Society, because this issue really is a statement of how the internet society views images.

Some of you are aware that recently a long hair fetish site was found to have images that were posted at other, legit long hair forums (LHC, The Loom, FLHC2).  When I heard of the situation, I did visit the site and reviewed as many of the images as I could to see if any LL images were included.  Rest assured, I was not able to find any LL images.

This situation brings to light certain issues regarding sharing pictures on open forums.  LL does require membership to post messages, but they can be viewed by anybody passing by.  At the same time, any photos that are shown here, are viewable to those people.  I will work with Susan to see if there are some options for securing the photos, or that certain areas of the forum be more secure.

The "legal" issues involved with photos is an interesting one.  Legally, the image belongs to the person who took the picture.  They are the only ones who can redistribute it.  Some people think that anything they see on the internet is public and available for taking.  This is not true (but difficult to impossible to enforce).  The proper way to show a picture that you do not own, is to link to it, not redisplay it, and certainly not to take a copy of it, store it on your own server, then redisplay it as your own.

Some of you might be concerned about the safety issues of posting pictures.  If you worry that your image might be stolen and used for the personal satisfaction of a fetish, then you should probably limit posting your pictures on any public forum.  Most of us are careful to display our hair more than our faces, making public recognition difficult.  (None of us want some creep to walk up to us some day and say "HEY!  I know you.  I LOOOOOOVE your hair and have your picture on my computer".  )  More importantly, limiting the personal information about where we live, should be protected so that these creeps can't stalk us in order to get their own street shots of our hair (which they would own and could redisplay where ever they want).

You might be asking, how do I protect myself from these people?  The most obvious answer would be to never post a picture.  Some of you live by this rule, and I fully understand it.  I recommend this for any one under the age 18. 

Is there some way to share pictures in a safe manner?  There are no guarentees on the internet.  Here are a few of my suggestions:

1.  As I mentioned before, I will work on seeing if there is a way to develop a "Members only" viewing area where our personal journals and photos can be shared away from trolling eyes.

2.  Try to store your pictures in a place that you have control over them, so that you can delete them if/when you want.  Places like Photobucket would give you this kind of control.  Using www.tinypic.com does NOT give you this option - once it is hosted by them, you cannot remove it (However, you could remove the link in your messages).

3. If you have the technical expertise, "watermark" your pictures so that you can discourage trolls from stealing your pics.  This won't prevent it , but there are some trolls that would skip a watermarked pic.

4.  When taking pictures, don't use provocative poses or dress - this just encorages the trolls even more.

I'm sure many more suggestions can/will be made and I encourage you to make them.  However, please refrain from just stating your disgust that this occurs.  We all agree it would be best if it didn't occur.  We are upset when it happens.  But, as I stated before, it does happen and will continue to happen.  We have the responsibility to protect ourselves.  If we post a picture, we must know we are doing so with some risk. You have to decide how much risk you are willing to take.

Thanks for bringing this up here, BB  I appreciate your efforts in keeping this place comfortable and safe!

I agree that what happened on LHC indicates, that we should consider how to increase our security a little. Right now, we are a very comfy place, but also even more vulnerable than LHC. After all, those of us who post pictures (there's no jerk big enough to stop me from sharing my progress with you guys  ) do so mainly in two forums: our journals and photo board. So restricting access to those two forums would probably help. We could divide the hair journal forum to public and private so that newbies could still have access to some hair journal info and start their journals there. In LHC, this seems to have worked and there are still quite many public hair journals.

We are nowadays quite an active little community, and I don't think that anyone who wishes to join us would feel unwelcome if we required to get to know him a bit better before letting him to the forums that contain most personal stuff.

While we need to keep risks of posting pictures in mind, IMO we shouldn't get too scared because of events like this. Bad things can happen anywhere, and we can't stop living because we are afraid of them. It is not our fault if the pictures we post are stolen- to suggest that would be equivalent of saying to a raped girl that she should have dressed in less revealing clothes. Only those who have done wrong are guilty of bad things happening. If we start acting out of fear, the creeps have won.

This being said, I have every confidence in your ability to decide things for our good!

I spent the entire evening last night reading the thread about this at LHC, and it is a scary idea. The idea that myself or those I consider friends on here could possibly be hurt/used in that way sickens me. I will not let something like that keep me from posting pictures in a community I truly feel at home in, but extra security online is always something to consider.

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I believe the pics that were "stolen" from LHC were signature pics, not pics from the private journals.  Signature pics do not have the 100 post requirement.

Yes, I think a member only needs 25 posts eta in LHC to view signatures.