Copyright protection

Ipernity offers some predefined groups (we can call it "levels of audience" or "categories of visitors" - and you can control access to your works for each of them:
  • you
  • your family (in your contacts)
  • your friends (in your contacts)
  • acquaintances (in your contacts)
  • all others visitors
It's pretty similar concept to Circles in Google+ or Lists of friends on Facebook. Unlike Google+ or Facebook, here you cannot rename these groups nor add any new group.

Ususally - access level to your works on ipernity is decreasing for representants of the groups placed at the end of the previous list. It makes sense - you usually share most details with your family, less with friends and with unknown and anonymouse visitors you need not to share anything.

Enough theory. Picture is worth of thousand words:

This setting is a keypoint for controlling the access of your audience to your works.
A bit hidden in your profile setting...: click Account setting -> Photos and other content -> Rules applicable to all of your content instantly - > Maximum quality, download, embedded code -> Edit the rules.

This settings applies to all content you have on ipernity.
Here you define what maximum allowed resolution of your works can see which audience level. You also control, which audience level will have option to download your work in menu.

In the example above, only your family can download your works... and they can download original version. Of course, providing you are in ipernity club, you have acces to download of original too. ;-) Your friends can see original photo, but they don't have direct download option and cannot download with Right click -> Save as.
Other audience does not have access to your original.

Mind you: experienced users can always download what they see on the web page. So this settings does not cut off completely your friends from your original. It only makes it more difficult for them to reach it. Link to the original displayed file is hidden somewhere in the code of the web page. And anybody can look at the web page code.

The setting above is quite restrictive. Only you can reach your original, anybody other can see only small version (800 px larger size) and cannot directly download it. This way, you have strong protection of your original work.

But there are also licences... Licence setting can override the setting above. By publishing under any Creative Commons licence you give anybody full access to your work. It's the nature of this type of licence.

Comparing Panoramio and ipernity copyright protection
Panoramio is very transparent in copyright protection: everything you upload is visible and acessible in exatctly same form as it was uplaoded. So if you don't want to expose originals of your works to public - you have to resize them, make them smaller before upload. Drawback is - you don't have your original backuped and available online - not even for yourself.
In addition, Panoramio does not keep visitors from downloading any photo - common technique of right click was not surpressed.

Ipernity can serve to your visitors resized (smaller) version of your work and preserve your original work only for you. You can decide and control which category of your visitors will see what resolution.
In addition, ipernity can remove "Download" link for some categories of visitors and right click on photo does not download it... it makes download of displayed photos harder (but not impossible)!

And now...


Protection of your privacy

Privacy - it's all about control who can see what kind of your information...
  • You need not to tell everybody where you make your photos.
  • You need not to show your family photos to public audience.
  • You need not tell where you live and when you were born.
Especially combination of your real name and (real) date of the birth is sensitive. Personally, I am very reluctant to share my birth date anywhere online. It's not the matter of vanity. It's a concern of security. Knowing your name and the date of the birth is the first step how to match yout identity in other databases. And mind you: from known birth date it's not far e.g. to open bank account or make a loan under your counterfeit identity. If I am mandatory forced to enter birth date (e.g. to complete registration) to some online service, I often use a random, fictitious date. ;-)

Well... where are privacy sensitive items on ipernity and how you can control them?

Many of them are in profile settings in the sections "Your ipernity Account" and "Profile and Privacy".

Under "Your real identity" section you can set up your real name, your date of birth and a place of your residence. Good new is - you can control, who can see this information: Only you, Family, Friends, all your contacts. all identified users, all users (including anonymouse use of the site). I recommend you to be rather restrictive with these items. If you are obsessive and paranoid (no offence ment!) think of various cases of hacked sites and data leakage... and be careful. ;-)

Other important personal information can be set (and access to them controlled) in following sections: I suggest you to visit all the links above and review your privacy setting made here!

Other important section is Photos and other content - Who will be able to see your new content?
Here you can set default method of publication of your photos and other content (who can see it). Anyway, you can individually fine-tune visibility of each photo, article and so on. It is default per-photo setting.
In the same section is other important default setting of licence, under which you publish the photos: Which default license? Licence effect on your copyright protection is decribed in previous chapter. Again - licence is per photo setting, you can change default (defined here) individually for each photo.
Who will be able to identify people on your photos, your videos…? - Good function for Facebook. But if you don't want let other people to give names to persons captured on your photos, set this options to "Only me" (and think twice if it's fair to use this "identify me on photo" function).
Automatically add the place of the shooting information if GPS info is available - Setting this item to NO disable revealing photo shooting location (if present in EXIF) without notice. Sometimes you don't want to reveal, where you made your photos and when, huh...?
Who can see the technical information (EXIF, ID3...)? and Display the shooting information on your photo pages? - yes, this is important to disable if you don't want to share when you made your photo and with what kind of camera. Probaly less important item...

Very important Maximum quality, download, embedded code item item was discussed in the chapter above.

Other items in Photos and other content section are probably less important (controlling comments, community based keywords tagging).