Yesterday I found myself tagged on my Sevilla Tapas Facebook account in about ten photos, which then showed up in my timeline, and after that my notifications became cluttered with comments on these “photos of me” by people I don’t know. And they weren’t even photos of me, but of tapas from a local bar. So I spent about 15 minutes tracking down all the photos, removing the tags, and then wrote to the women who posted them, asking her to please not do that again. And I also wrote an entry on my Facebook timeline that said: “Please stop tagging me in photos I am not in just to promote your business. Thank you.”

I mean, it’s bad enough when people leave links on my timeline to stuff that is clearly just blatant self-promotion, and not to something that is being shared because someone thinks I’d be interested in it. But tagging people in photos like this is actually an abuse of the Facebook tagging system. It’s meant to be used to let someone know you’ve posted a photo of them on your FB page, not as an attention-seeking cheap trick to get people to look at your stuff.

Anyhoodle, my friend Del (aka WeeRascal) replied to this – probably because he doesn’t like me dissing Facebook  😉 – by referring to the collages I did of those wonderful old photos of Semana Santa in Sevilla the other day, one of which I also posted here on casa az, which have my ©azahar-sevilla.com watermark on them. He questioned the ethics of putting my copyright on other people’s photos, and at first I thought I’d done something terribly wrong. But then I realised that they were actually collages of photos I’d taken at the exhibit – a public place – and not of copyrighted images I’d found online. And well, since I wasn’t around in 1885, I reckoned it was pretty clear that I wasn’t trying to take credit for the photos. But it does seem like a bit of a grey area. What do you think? Both about the annoying Facebook tagging issue and the copyright confusion.

You can see the Facebook conversation below (click to enlarge) or click here to be taken to the Facebook post.
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