This landed in my Flickr email this morning:

"If you haven't already seen it, go to flickr.com/photos/whitmanphotography/336904266/

Especially relevant if you have kids in your photostream.

I sent this to everyone on my contact list. The more people that see it, the better."

Seems someone has been taking photos of children posted on various Flickr accounts and reposting them on a site that apparently looked ... um ... creepy (read: pedophile). You can puruse the comment section and read all about what happened, what's happening, etc.

For those of you interested in protecting yourself/your children, you can mark the photos you post private, as well. I went through all 600+ photos this morning to make sure I'd properly marked all the ones private that needed to be.

Here's a list of links (reposted from comment section of above link) that will come in handy:

flickr.com/account/prefs/blogging/ this is where to can stop someone from blogging one of your photos

flickr.com/account/prefs/apioptout/ this is where you can opt out of allowing people to steal your pics... at least the ones that can't hack them out anyway

netomer.de/flickrtools/inspector/ this is where you can go to see if someone else has blogged your photos

It goes without saying that when you post something publicly, you run the risk of this happening. And it totally sucks that the world we live in has a plethora of pervs.

Awareness is everything!