H Koppie Koppie, it's not your kids' photo selling business, it's not even a real business venture. Instead, it is a social experiment, as the Dimitri Tokmetzis website, and the journalist, and co-founder Yuri Veerman call it.
It is a social experiment that aims to raise awareness of privacy in the era of social networks, as they say.
They use pictures of children all over world to earn money. They print them on coffee mugs and distribute them through their website. It might sound creepy and illegal, but the duo of Koppie Koppie can do it perfectly legally within the confines of Flickr's services.
This can be because the photos of children and babies they use (sometimes displayed with their parents) are marked with the Creative Commons licensing indication, which gives them the right for further commercial use.
In an article published in Medium, Tokmetzis explains that Koppie Koppie deliberately violates the privacy of children and their families, but not in the legal sense of the term.
Media platforms such as Flickr (owned by Yahoo), Instagram and Snapchat, along with Facebook and Google, are constantly changing the "context" in which we share information, Tokmetzis said.
When we share information with our doctor with a close friend, we have the reasonable expectation that the information will not be shared.
But social media is changing the expectation of our privacy in complex ways that we do not always understand.
Although we may have carefully set up security on Facebook and limited who can see them updates and our photos, our privacy still depends on Facebook and the network of our friends who do not respect our wishes.
Many people do not fully understand how these Companies they can use their data and content for profit.
Tokmetzis reports that Facebook, Flickr and other social media companies are promising control, but they fail to fully explain the context on how and in what ways public information can be shared with others.
The experiment Koppie Koppie it can be creepy because it involves children, but it seems to motivate enough people to watch what they bring to social networks.
Koppie Koppie's managers promise to download every photo at the request of parents within two weeks.
