Koppie Koppie is a new online store that wants to teach us all an Important Lesson About Privacy--by slapping photos of random kids they've scraped from flickr onto mugs you, a total stranger, can buy.
Their point is about how we unwittingly give control of our images, text, and video--our entire online lives--to companies and websites who can sell or exploit it however they want. I'm not sure that selling mugs with Creative Commons-licensed flickr photos is the cleanest way to make this point.
But as someone who long ago decided not to post pics or names or other info of his kid on the public web, and who has written before about this image/product circulation mayhem, which I dubbed "Scraper Capitalism," I heartily encourage awareness, informed discussion, and robust privacy tools.
And in the interest of preserving the privacy options of folks whose kids' mugs are on the mugs above, DT is obscuring their identities. Images on actual mugs will be unredacted.
Koppie Koppie [koppie-koppie.biz]
On Scraper Capitalism [greg.org]
