Today I hate cyberspace

I am not all that technological. I have learned most of my Internet skills from blogging, messaging and emailing.
I have learned enough over my time online to know how to stay relatively safe, this is especially pertaining to my child and my family.

Well, I got a digital camera and while I have been very selective of what I do with these photos, I guess I made the mistake at some point of allowing a very shady person have access to my computer, probably under the guise of something innocent like checking email. However I now have come to learn they have somehow gained possesion of a fairly large collection of my private and personal photos, and have taken it upon themselves to post them online in a very public domain over which I have no control who sees them.
These include photos of my parents, siblings and my young child.

Luckily I am a volunteer with a children's safety group so I know where to start to get the photos removed, unfortunately most of the advice involves me suing the individual in question as a civil matter as opposed to her being charged or anything criminal.

Now for the most part I am paranoid enough that (aside from my sibling and parent's photos) there's not much a little photo online can do to scare me, that I am not already in prevention mode for, however, upon learning that anyone else would be hard pressed to be listened to or assisted in a similar situation, I feel it is my responsibility to either get a clear and concise list of action and recourse, or if none exists, take actions to make some available.

There are a lot of issues that come into play, the first one the RCMP discussed was malice. Malice being what the intent is of posting the photos. I would suggest that anyone posting photos of others without permission, particularly where identifying info is included, or even when the rightful owner does not have the photos available publicly is malicious.

Anyways, I am now starting the preliminary steps in seeing what's available on the law books and what could be changed or added to address this issue, and then will determine if or how to go about taking on more then I can chew with this issue.
In the mean time if you have any experiences with the issue of personal info/photos ending up online, or with the laws surrounding them please leave a message or you can email news@putkidsfirst.org to share your experience.