H Koppie Koppie, it's not a business selling photos of your kids, it's not even a real commercial business. On the contrary, it is a social experiment, as the website managers Dimitri Tokmetzis, and the journalist, call it, and co-founder Yuri Veerman.
It is a social experiment that aims to raise awareness of privacy in the era of social networks, as they say.
They use photos by kids all over the 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 the social media it changes our expectation of privacy in complex ways that we don't always realize.
Although we may have carefully adjusted Facebook security and have limited who can see our updates and photos, privacy protection is still dependent on Facebook and the network of our friends who do not respect our wishes.
Many people do not fully understand how these companies 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 admins promise to download every photo upon request of parents in two weeks.
