Private Photos Find Way to Online Viewers

The privacy settings on online photo-sharing sites aren’t always foolproof, as one Washington mother discovered. After posting pictures of her kids skinny-dipping on Flickr and marking them “private,” she found recently that they had been viewed thousands of times, the Washington Post reports. "Are creepy people searching through thousands of pictures looking for random naked ones?” she wonders.

An official with the Center for Democracy and Technology recommends that users check Web sites’ default privacy settings, but also said companies could do a better job of informing people about their options. For their part, the sites suggest that users have a friend try to break into private albums to see how secure they are. (More Flickr stories.)