It seems like the world today is oversaturated with digital photos.

Some people post untouched photos to social media sites, while others use Photoshop to edit and manicure that perfect picture before they post.

Whatever techniques they may use to alter the photo, it’s clear that people are enthralled with taking pictures of themselves. Here I am on my webcam. Eating at a restaurant. Brushing my teeth. Making ridiculous faces.

I find this trend extremely off-putting.

In 2009, Facebook was accumulating 2.5 billion new photos a month. At the time they were allowing up to 600,000 photos to be served a second.

But it’s not the quantity of photos that makes me worry, or the way that documenting every little piece of our lives ruins our memories - no, it’s the public sharing.

Ultimately, I don’t care about people trying to sell themselves as interesting individuals or as amateur celebrities. That’s not what I’m getting at. I’m talking about our privacy - which we apparently don’t mind giving up.

For example, social media sites, like Facebook, have their Terms and Conditions clause which states that they own your photos and are free to do with them as they please.

The counterargument to this would be, “Well just moderate what you post.”

True, but the clause is still unsettling, as I’d like to believe that my photos are my photos.

And it’s gone even further than that, with advances in things like facial recognition technology, software that has the ability to automatically identify/verify a person from digital images.

Alessandro Acquisti from Carnegie Mellon University conducted a proof-of-concept study that involved three different experiments.

The first took anonymous photos of people from dating sites and successfully matched them to their Facebook profile one out of ten times.

The second took photos of random people from off the street who had been surveyed and successfully matched them to their Facebook profile one out of three times. They didn’t even have to log in to Facebook or friend them to acquire it.

The third took anonymous photos from dating sites where the person’s date and place of birth were public, and with that information they were able to track down social security numbers.

They even took it one step further and created a smartphone app that would allow you to take a photo of someone anonymous and have their information sent back to you. Scary, right?

Although it’s said that facial recognition technology is still limited in its efficiency today, I worry about the possibilities it may achieve in the future and if the boundaries of our privacy will then be redefined.

So I say embrace your photos - but think twice before you choose how to share them.

Adam Petrash worries too much, but don’t we all?

Published in Volume 66, Number 11 of The Uniter (November 9, 2011)