A similar thing happened to me when I lost a phone in Vietnam. I ended up having to remotely nuke the phone in order to stop the photos when a few images came through of a family visiting a grave. Too creepy.
I wonder how common/repeatable this is, and what the minimum requirements are for a device to get picked up and used this way. It might be an interesting art project for someone to plant a few tens of cheap smartphones around, assuming we could reasonably expect at least several of them to broadcast interesting slices of people's lives.
The lack of any apparent attempt at reconfiguring/personalising a device you find and don't intend to return, but instead what seems to be just regular use, must be due to a very different attitude/knowledge about computers in general. It's a very interesting story though.
This idea of returning things you found does not exist everywhere. I know places where if you found something you would look up and thank the heavens for looking out for you today. You would not think that someone lost something, but rather that someone upstairs brought you a gift.
Interesting in a voyeuristic way. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to "tap in" to someone else's photos across the world, in exchange for making your own photos available for one and only one other person to tap into? Like a one-way chatroulette for photos.
You act as though you could apply some simple legal test to this essentially ethical question. I think it's very hard to make an ethical case for sharing photos someone made (with an extremely high likelihood of) not knowing they would be public for entertainment purposes.
Private photos are private photos, even if made by a thief and they don't suddenly become public because the thief accidentally shares them with someone. When I accidentally share photos with someone I sure hope they would tell me about it and not share them with the world.
The author openly acknowledges they left the phone behind by mistake in a position where they weren't able to attempt to retrieve it, and we have absolutely no reason to assume any ill-intent on the part of the teenage monk that appeared to have started using it weeks later.
(Though, that said, I suspect that monk in question would be unlikely to be especially upset to find the photos online, having quite happily posed for plenty of photos with falangs who presumably had their own cameras anyway.)
My ethical view on this is that in general (but not always) you need explicit consent before you publish the photograph of someone. Just having access to the photos (in this case it’s probably still the monk who has the copyright to those photos, but that’s a trickier question, but certainly also another potential angle to look at this) or even having copyright to the photos is not enough.
That’s also not an altogether uncommon view. In Germany it’s codified into law, for example.
There should obviously be exceptions to this and some are really easy to come up with (political events or demonstrations or all kinds of public events in general), with others it gets trickier, but most if not all of the monk’s photos shouldn’t be exceptions.
Also, many of those photos have more people than the monk in them, so it’s not like you could frame this as some sort of punishment of a thief. The other people are just as affected!
In the UK, if you find something of value, you can take to the police station. The police give you a receipt. If no one has claimed the item after some period of time (3-6 months?) then you can go back and collect it. You did your best.
Let's say I come into possession of an iPod touch that way. Should I still have no right to privacy?
Interesting situation. I really hate this kind of writing though because I wish it would just start with "I lost my ipod touch and now some guy is using it to post pictures on my timeline" instead of being mysterious and trying to build suspense.
