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by Patrick Brethour
The Globe and Mail
Sep 9, 2007
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For a week, the late night burglary at the WorkSpace company was like hundreds of other robberies in downtown Vancouver, offering little hope of recovering six stolen computers.
Then yesterday morning, pictures from one of the stolen computers started showing up on the social-networking site Flickr - photo album to the world-turning a mundane break-in into a high-tech who dunit.
Dane Brown, manger at WorkSpace, received a call from a friend who told him about the mysterious photo on the company’s Flickr Web page of a heavily tattooed man peering into the digital camera on one of the stolen computers, an iMac. A second photo shows a man’s back with intricate tattoo work.
Flickr, owned by Yahoo, is one of the biggest social-networking sites, an online genre that combines the deeply private with the entirely public.
The man seems to have been entirely unaware of the existence of that world – or at least the fact that the iMac was set up to send photos directly to WorkSpace’s account on the Flickr website once a user agreed to the innocuous request to upload.
Although the photo of the man is titled “Me,” Mr. Brown said he doesn’t believe the pictures are an online taunt. “I think this is total ignorance.”
He said the pictures must have come from the stolen computer because only that machine contains the password needed to access the company’s Flickr account.
But the man in the photos is not alone in his difficulties in adjusting to the digital age. With the story set to hit the mass media last night, Mr. Brown tried to pass on the online identification of where the computer was being used in the hopes that police could obtain an address quickly and the question the digital-photography enthusiast. They declined to act immediately, and the man is unlikely to remain where he is once the story appears on television, Mr. Brown said.
Constable Howard Chow of the Vancouver Police Department said investigators would follow up any lead, but he noted that there is not yet any proof that the person in the photos is connected to the crime or even realizes he is using stolen property. Charges would depend on a number of factors, including intent, he noted.
The incident bears a striking resemblance to another incident detailed by Flickr website, in which British retailer Top Shop issued a public plea for the return of a stolen laptop after pictures were sent from the machine to Flickr.
For technology expert Rick Broadhead, the Vancouver incident underscores the gap between the technical capabilities of today’s computers and their intricate software links to the Web, and the perception by computer users that their machine is somehow private. “A computer is like a high-tech booby trap.” says Mr. Broadhead, author of Dear Valued Customer: You are a Loser, a catalogue of technology blunders and gaffes.
It can be disconcerting even for those who see themselves as technologically literate. Gisele Baxter, a University of British Columbia lecturer who studies popular culture and communications technology, when using a friend’s Mac laptop when she triggered the webcam and found herself the subject of an inadvertent broadcast.
“All of a sudden, I was looking at my face on her screen,” said Ms. Baxter.
If Vancouver police find Flickr of help in their investigation, they will have plenty of company.
Kaan Yigit, senior partner at Solutions Research Group Consultants Inc. in Toronto, said Flickr and other social-networking sites have become a treasure trove of personal information that even a few years ago would have been difficult to obtain. “Social media is like a detective’s dream come true.”
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