Are there pictures of you floating around in cyberspace? How do you know? If you participate in any peer-to-peer networks than there just might be.
Now I know what you’re saying… but paul, I don’t keep my photos in my shared folder. Well, that may be true, but can the same be said for everyone you know, or every place you’ve ever been where someone was taking pictures? I think not.
These are from a site called Found Photo. It was created by a guy named Rich Vogel. In late 2004, while searching for mp3’s with his favorite file sharing app, Rich came across a folder called ‘pictures’ on a remote user’s shared hard drive. He instantly became interested in what else people were sharing. Today he has a site with possibly thousands of these found images.
You can learn more about how he got started on the about page of Rich’s site, but I think Troy, from idle type summed it up pretty nicely:
A voyeuristic collection of photos snatched from the openly shared folders on people’s hard drives. Sometimes bizarre, sometimes hilarious, sometimes creepy — and addictive as hell!
… I couldn’t agree more.