In the wake of the coverage of our upcoming launch, there’s been a natural discussion about what effect Polar Rose will have on privacy. We’re conscious of this issue and have been so from the very start; when founding the company, when first introducing the idea to Nordic Venture Partners (our investors), and with colleagues before and after they were hired.
It should come as little surprise that we believe that Polar Rose adds tremendous value to the photo web. We think we’re as harmful to the photo web, as Altavista, Yahoo!, and Google have been to the text web. By sorting the text web, these search engines exposed the wonderful resource of public documents that web had already become. The side-effect was that information which was not meant for public consumption, but which was kept private by obscurity, was suddenly exposed and searchable.
So is the photo web today. Hundreds of millions of photos that are screaming to be sorted, viewed, and searched are not being so because no one took the time – or had a facility like Flickr or other photo-sharing sites – to add descriptions, names, or tags. We want to sort this photo web to make each photo more valuable to the viewer, but also to the person who shot it. Tell the story, make it discoverable.
We’ll end up finding photos that the published never really thought of as being public. The trick, however, is not to turn off the technology, just like Altavista or any of the subsequent search engines weren’t shut down or otherwise censored. The challenge is to facilitate a way to make sure that photos that shouldn’t be in our database, aren’t. This can be by restricting access or by telling us not to pick them up.
- We don’t index private photos; photos behind a firewall, login, or on a user’s desktop computer. (We’ll do some partnerships where private photos will be indexed, but thus only for the individual user’s viewing)
- We honor robots.txt and subsequent requests by a site owner to remove photos from our database.
- We’ll never engage Polar Rose in the application of the technology in security or surveillance. It’s explicitly stated in the contracts we enter with partners.
While we believe we have a good grip of the privacy issues at hand, more are going to pop up. I and others from within the company will continue to post on this subject here and anywhere else the discussion happens – by email, phone or on other blogs. Privacy will always, always stay top-of-mind.
