NowPublic, a website all about encouraging members of the public to act as “citizen journalists” has some terrible processes in place. I had a picture that one of their members wanted to use. They sent me an email via flickr which didn’t give me a return address and that sent me to a link which would allow me to indicate that I was happy to share my picture. In order to do this though, I would be obliged to join their site and fill in a membership form. Not only that, but to be a member I would have to “Agree to the Terms of Service and receive e-mails from NowPublic.”

I was happy to let my picture be used and indeed to encourage a new site, but not at the cost of receiving an unspecified amount of additional email from a site - and for all I know from third parties as well - I couldn’t even find a reference to whether or not I might get such mails in the terms of service or privacy policy!

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 20th, 2008 at 9:25 am and is filed under Amateur media production. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.