8 ms·

TIL there's a wiki website for foot fetishists. I believe everyone has a right to their own fetishes. Nothing wrong with being into feet. But the thing that re

by yosito 6y ago

TIL there's a wiki website for foot fetishists. I believe everyone has a right to their own fetishes. Nothing wrong with being into feet. But the thing that really puts me off about this interview and the WikiFeet website is the lack of consent. Uploading photos of someone without their consent is wrong. The fact that the purpose is to satisfy a fetish adds an extra layer of creepy. Regardless of how the interviewer feels about it, and regardless of whether the photos came from a public Instagram account, it's not ok to upload photos of someone to a fetish website without their consent.

camillomiller 6y ago
I do not agree. These are photos posted publicly on Instagram or Facebook. Anyone could see them. This website just aggregates them, but there's technically a live link to these pictures. And no, the fact that someone uploads them to a service whose ToS they have accepted makes no difference. You're posting something publicly? To me that's explicit consent that you want people to see them. If those pics were behind even the slightest wall (like a private account) or taken from private messages of course that would be different.
- tobr 6y ago
  Strongly disagree, both from a legal and moral point of view. Posting something publicly absolutely does not imply that anyone is free to do whatever they want with it.
  - contravariant 6y ago
    Case in point: the existence of copyright licenses.
- yosito 6y ago
  When I upload photos to Instagram, I am not explicitly consenting to my photos being used for people's fetishes, even privately. I can't stop people from doing what they want privately with my public photos, and I know that, but I still find it morally wrong and disturbing. But I'm not sure that it's legal to republish someone's public Instagram photos on another website either. I'm no legal expert, but I believe it's still a copyright violation to copy someone's Instagram photos and use them as content in your own creations. But legal or not, I think it ought to be considered common decency not to post photos of someone on a fetish website without asking for their explicit permission to do so.
  - throw14082020 6y ago
    Totally, but its such a grey line. If you posted some pictures and certain groups use it as their "personal materials" privately (without sharing), I'm not sure how we can stop that
  - enriquto 6y ago
    What if it was just text links to the instagram accounts? What if it was iframes?
    - yosito 6y ago
      Again, legal, but not a nice or decent thing to do.
      - enriquto 6y ago
        So, OK basically? Indecent things are allowed. You can criticize them, of course, but they are still allowed. People have the right to write non-nice things about you (as long as it's not libel). They can write that they don't like you for whatever reason, or they can write that they get off thinking about you. There's freedom of expression to do stupid, non-nice and indecent shit.
        monkey_monkey 6y ago
        No one is saying it's not legal. Most people here understand what libel is and what freedom of expression is. The point is that it's still a bit weird, creepy and unpleasant. This man can continue doing it, and I can continue thinking he's quite damaged.
        enriquto 6y ago
        > The point is that it's still a bit weird, creepy and unpleasant. This man can continue doing it, and I can continue thinking he's quite damaged. That's alright. I'm pretty much indifferent to the whole thing, but I still enjoyed the interview. Notice that the man may be "quite damaged", but still the first thing that he does is ask the interviewer if she was offended by her public photos being there, and offering to delete them.
- gjulianm 6y ago
  > This website just aggregates them, but there's technically a live link to these pictures. What you see as a technicality is actually a big difference. No one on wikiFeet would have seen the pictures of the interviewer if someone hadn't posted it. Posting something is not explicit consent to do whatever with it. Would you say the same if these pictures were appearing on a shirt for example? Or if they were used in a movie, or in a newspaper article?
  - VBprogrammer 6y ago
    Is this much different from what Pinterest and Google images do?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- red_trumpet 6y ago
  I think there are two dimensions. The personal consent one, where I do not agree with your opinion, but that's okay. On the other hand, copying a picture to another website can also be a copyright infringement.
  - yosito 6y ago
    How would you feel if you walked by a porn shop, and in the window you saw a magazine cover with a photo of you taken from your public social media accounts printed on the cover with the headline, "Hottest people on Instagram to get off to in 2021". Some people may be flattered by that, but many, many people would feel that it was a violation and an assault to their dignity.
    - ZoomZoomZoom 6y ago
      If you look at this hypothetical case without prejudice, the only difference with your photo appearing on a news site, in someone's post on social media, as a picture on some forum or just being uploaded to image sharing service is for-profit nature of the usage.
      - pojzon 6y ago
        After checking the site I can tell it has quite a few tracking cookies enabled - so for sure it is profitting from the illegal content. Ps. This also doesnt cover copyright claims.
      - yosito 6y ago
        No, this has nothing to do with profit at all.
      - furyg3 6y ago
        No. Even nonprofits (see Wikipedia) have to follow strict rules about licensing images or face legal consequences. They also do a good job of policing this on-upload, something that a site like Wikifeed does not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_use_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_use_policy
- watwut 6y ago
  It does not work that way, not even legally. Just because a picture is online does not mean anyone is free to distribute it further. The legality of it depends on copyright and on TOS of places where it was uploaded originally.
- ZoomZoomZoom 6y ago
  >You're posting something publicly? To me that's explicit consent that you want people to see them. To see them where I posted them. Pictures are an intellectual property of the author, if a person wants other people to spread them, he/she needs to explicitly set the allowing license. Copyright, fair use and such is a hot and nuanced topic, but the bottom line here is that personal pictures getting shared is not what most people expect to happen, understandably so.
  - quotemstr 6y ago
    > Pictures are an intellectual property of the author, if a person wants other people to spread them, he/she needs to explicitly set the allowing license. It's more complicated than that. What actions require a license? Nobody needs a license to create a hyperlink. The concept of a "link license" was a big subject of debate in the 1990s, but after much hand-wringing and heated discussion, we converged on a permissionless model for hyperlinking on the web. I think everyone here understands the high value of frictionless linking. Now let's suppose for the sake of argument (and without loss of generality) that this foot fetish site were just a list of hyperlinks to publicly available foot pictures in their original context. I suspect the author of the article (and a lot of other people) would still be squicked out by the foot-fetishist link-aggregator site. But what could be done about it? Permissioneless linking is a huge boon for the web and humanity. Should we add friction to linking just because foot fetish sites exist? Okay --- what if it's not linking, but actual photo embedding? Still, we'd need to examine the costs and benefits. Embedding public content in another context is great for commentary, synthesis, and other creative transformations. People love to showcase hard work and beauty. Should we add friction to photo embeds everywhere just because some squicky foot fetishists use embeds to aggregate images? Again, it doesn't seem worth it. Ultimately, we have to learn to let things go. There will always be people in the world who use public things in a "wrong" way: a politician you don't like may use your favorite song in a campaign; a company might use your open source library to make a product you'd prefer not to exist; or public property records might let speculators arbitrage prices in a way that seems unfair. But whenever we're tempted to Do Something about people using the public thing in the wrong way, we have to think "is this Doing Something going to be net positive? What about the value of the commons itself? Am I willing to destroy that just to Do Something about this one thing?" Most of the time, the answer is "no".
- kenneth 6y ago
  Alright then, for the sake of argument then how would you feel if there was a website named "wikipedo" where people take the normal photos of children posted on social media and aggregate them thusly with a vastly different intent?
  - f1refly 6y ago
    Getting off to feet is generally considered weird but okay, getting off to children is not. Your comparison is not applicable.
  - FDSGSG 6y ago
    That would be confusing, what would we call enthusiastic wikipedia users then?
  - camillomiller 6y ago
    Getting off to feet is part of broader adult sexual freedom. You can’t compare it pedophilia, c’mon.
- furyg3 6y ago
  Sorry, but no. First there is the question of licensing. The users are posting (and site is hosting) images that they (presumably) don't have licenses to use or permission to post to that site. A photograph being publicly available does not put it in the public domain, and certainly doesn't mean that a site is licensed to run ads on it (though even without financial gain it would still not be legally ok). The very first site rule is "uploading copyrighted photos is forbidden unless you have permission from the copyright owner" which I presume is supposed to shield the site owner from this legal issue, but I think we can all agree that the vast majority of photos on this site do not meet this requirement. And secondly there is the question of context. I may give my employer permission to put my photo on their "About Us" page, but I would not be amused if the later transferred it to a "Consultants who we will never work with again" page.
  - kevincox 6y ago
    I don't think the original poster is talking about licensing. It is an issue, but not unique to sites like this and not relevant to the parent's concerns. What if this site just linked to the photos instead? I think that would still make people uncomfortable and is not illegal. Context is the problem and it is unclear. In most countries you can't really prevent people from saying things about you. If someone wants to post online that they like you feet they are allowed to do so. I agree that when this is distilled to a database of people and their feet it feels a bit weird, but I struggle to find a point where it becomes not ok.
    - furyg3 6y ago
      I don't get why this is so tough. It's ok for someone to talk about how they like your feet... until the point where they start posting images of your feet without 'permission' (permission in the legal sense refers to licensing).
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  The law is quite clear on this. You're granting Instagram a license to display the image, so they are allowed to do that. Other websites aren't, unless you grant them a license, too. So the foot fetish website is infringing copyright. And the author of the image can sue them for damages. They can also ask ISPs to blacklist the page if they don't comply. Kind of all the stuff that the MPAA does when they find a movie rip on someone's server, the photographer could do here, too.
  - boudin 6y ago
    What you say is right, but is about copyright, not consent. No social media collect the consent of people in the actual pictures when the person in the picture is not the one who is posting it.
  - PurpleFoxy 6y ago
    What damages? Were you selling those feet pics?
- freewilly1040 6y ago
  Let’s say you have a LinkedIn profile picture, and someone posts that picture to a site about people who look like they might be pedophiles. Would you be ok with that?
  - kevincox 6y ago
    That is very different. That is implying that you may be a pedofile which is unpleasant whether or not there is a photo and whether or no anyone else even sees it. This is saying that you have nice feet, which may make some people uncomfortable, and isn't necessary "right", but is completely different.
    - freewilly1040 6y ago
      It's unwanted attention on the internet. I think it's fine to make fun of people who look like pedopohiles (not saying you are a pedophile, that would be libel probably). Some people have a problem with it, but I don't, so what's the big deal?
- kevincox 6y ago
  A lot of the responses to this comments are focusing on licensing which I think is missing the interesting point of this thought. I agree that many of the images here are likely copyright infringement but this is not a new, unique or interesting problem. Imagine that instead of rehosting the images they just linked to the original source on social media. This is now legal, but is it "right" to aggregate images under this context?
theshrike79 6y ago
> TIL there's a wiki website for foot fetishists. Foot fetishists are SO common. If you don't count the boob & ass normies, foot fetishists are a clear number one in the fetish sector. I don't know if they're that common or they're just easy to cater to (taking a few pics of feet isn't a huge issue for anyone who makes a living on their looks).
adventured 6y ago
Is it ok to publish photos of celebrities, athletes or politicians (public persons broadly) in newspapers, news stories online, or in magazines, or on forums, or on Wikipedia? If so, then it's morally ok to upload these feet photos. What about by outlets that some people don't regard as being legitimate news, like MSNBC or Fox? Those sources often seem like fetish outlets, they sell crack to partisans who mentally masturbate all day long to outrage porn headlines. How about ESPN and athletes? They sell fetish obsession 24/7 to sports addicts of every possible variety. Fetishists obsessed with how tennis players grunt. You name it. WikiFeet apparently has an IMDB rule in terms of who may be published, which seems within the realm of being reasonable as a cut-off. And I strongly suspect that if the owner of eg Instagram photos that are being published on WikiFeet wanted them taken down for copyright reasons, WikiFeet would certainly comply with a simple email.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
fergie 6y ago
In my younger days I would probably have agreed with you OP. Now that I am older, I have come to appreciate the time, ambition, energy and reward that goes into being a public figure. I am also a bit wiser to the whole game of getting attention whilst pretending that you are not looking for it. I feel like the best way to deal with this situation is just to accept that its all OK. Its OK to be an young, rich, attractive white woman. Its OK to publish pics of yourself on instagram. Its OK to be into feet. Its ok to like and share public content that you find online. The message of the article is that its a bit weird, but its OK. Lets not be too quick to shame and judge. (The comments about Jennifer Aniston were interesting too- there is clearly a subtext here about the reach and power of women on these platforms, and again- this is all OK!)
- yosito 6y ago
  I'm not talking about public figures. > I feel like the best way to deal with this situation is just to accept that its all OK. It's not all ok. It's ok to be into feet. It's ok to be any age, race, class. It's ok to publish anything you want about yourself in any way you choose. I'm not judging or shaming any of those things. What's NOT ok is using/sharing someone's photos without their consent. In legal terms, it's likely a violation of copyright laws. In terms of morality/decency, it's a violation of respect for another person's boundaries.
somedude895 6y ago
> I noticed that wikiFeet has pretty strict rules about whose feet and what kinds of photos you can post. The person has to have an IMDb page to be fair game. Do you pay attention to those rules when you want to post someone like me, who isn’t as well-known? > Yeah. For example, a musician from England who performed barefoot, like I’ll find a picture I think is sexy, and I’ll put her name in IMDb. And she didn’t have a page, so I couldn’t post hers. But you did. I feel the same way, but this seems to me to be a rule to make sure that only pictures of people who have considerable public exposure to begin with are okay to be posted, which seems sensible to me.
vagrantJin 6y ago
> But the thing that really puts me off about this interview and the WikiFeet website is the lack of consent. A bit of a harsh, knee-jeek reaction to something entirely meaningless. Topped with a vague proposition of privacy in a public forum. It's just feet. Unless someone knows you, your "privacy" isn't likely to be in peril from a site filled with feet.
- yosito 6y ago
  It's not about the feet. It's about the lack of consent. It troubles me that you don't see a problem with that.
  - mikem170 6y ago
    You used the word creepy to describe the wikifeet site, which might lead people to think that you are motivated by prudish reasons. From a legal consent perspective are you also opposed to google image search for the same reasons, that google did not get consent to redisplay the resulting images? What about pictures of public personas in news articles where consent was not given? Could I prevent my friends from posting unflattering pictures of me? What if I google images of feet to get off on? Maybe consent should apply to audio and written information, so people are not quoted out of context? The legalities around consent seem to get complicated, and conflict with other legal precedent. Also you might have a hard time convincing other people of the harm in feet pics, and that might be the first thing you need to do to get a law passed against it.
BTCOG 6y ago
While I'd agree that if he were sneaking into women's houses, snapping "candid" photos with no permission it would be one thing, but why do people entirely miss that this woman was posting all these pictures of her own feet on the internet? If anything, all this showcases in my opinion is how people share WAY too much personal info and then something like this can make them think twice about doing so.

by yosito 6y ago

camillomiller 6y ago

I do not agree. These are photos posted publicly on Instagram or Facebook. Anyone could see them. This website just aggregates them, but there's technically a live link to these pictures. And no, the fact that someone uploads them to a service whose ToS they have accepted makes no difference. You're posting something publicly? To me that's explicit consent that you want people to see them. If those pics were behind even the slightest wall (like a private account) or taken from private messages of course that would be different.

tobr 6y ago
Strongly disagree, both from a legal and moral point of view. Posting something publicly absolutely does not imply that anyone is free to do whatever they want with it.
- contravariant 6y ago
  Case in point: the existence of copyright licenses.
yosito 6y ago
When I upload photos to Instagram, I am not explicitly consenting to my photos being used for people's fetishes, even privately. I can't stop people from doing what they want privately with my public photos, and I know that, but I still find it morally wrong and disturbing. But I'm not sure that it's legal to republish someone's public Instagram photos on another website either. I'm no legal expert, but I believe it's still a copyright violation to copy someone's Instagram photos and use them as content in your own creations. But legal or not, I think it ought to be considered common decency not to post photos of someone on a fetish website without asking for their explicit permission to do so.
- throw14082020 6y ago
  Totally, but its such a grey line. If you posted some pictures and certain groups use it as their "personal materials" privately (without sharing), I'm not sure how we can stop that
- enriquto 6y ago
  What if it was just text links to the instagram accounts? What if it was iframes?
  - yosito 6y ago
    Again, legal, but not a nice or decent thing to do.
    - enriquto 6y ago
      So, OK basically? Indecent things are allowed. You can criticize them, of course, but they are still allowed. People have the right to write non-nice things about you (as long as it's not libel). They can write that they don't like you for whatever reason, or they can write that they get off thinking about you. There's freedom of expression to do stupid, non-nice and indecent shit.
      - monkey_monkey 6y ago
        No one is saying it's not legal. Most people here understand what libel is and what freedom of expression is. The point is that it's still a bit weird, creepy and unpleasant. This man can continue doing it, and I can continue thinking he's quite damaged.
        enriquto 6y ago
        > The point is that it's still a bit weird, creepy and unpleasant. This man can continue doing it, and I can continue thinking he's quite damaged. That's alright. I'm pretty much indifferent to the whole thing, but I still enjoyed the interview. Notice that the man may be "quite damaged", but still the first thing that he does is ask the interviewer if she was offended by her public photos being there, and offering to delete them.
gjulianm 6y ago
> This website just aggregates them, but there's technically a live link to these pictures. What you see as a technicality is actually a big difference. No one on wikiFeet would have seen the pictures of the interviewer if someone hadn't posted it. Posting something is not explicit consent to do whatever with it. Would you say the same if these pictures were appearing on a shirt for example? Or if they were used in a movie, or in a newspaper article?
- VBprogrammer 6y ago
  Is this much different from what Pinterest and Google images do?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
red_trumpet 6y ago
I think there are two dimensions. The personal consent one, where I do not agree with your opinion, but that's okay. On the other hand, copying a picture to another website can also be a copyright infringement.
- yosito 6y ago
  How would you feel if you walked by a porn shop, and in the window you saw a magazine cover with a photo of you taken from your public social media accounts printed on the cover with the headline, "Hottest people on Instagram to get off to in 2021". Some people may be flattered by that, but many, many people would feel that it was a violation and an assault to their dignity.
  - ZoomZoomZoom 6y ago
    If you look at this hypothetical case without prejudice, the only difference with your photo appearing on a news site, in someone's post on social media, as a picture on some forum or just being uploaded to image sharing service is for-profit nature of the usage.
    - pojzon 6y ago
      After checking the site I can tell it has quite a few tracking cookies enabled - so for sure it is profitting from the illegal content. Ps. This also doesnt cover copyright claims.
    - yosito 6y ago
      No, this has nothing to do with profit at all.
    - furyg3 6y ago
      No. Even nonprofits (see Wikipedia) have to follow strict rules about licensing images or face legal consequences. They also do a good job of policing this on-upload, something that a site like Wikifeed does not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_use_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_use_policy
watwut 6y ago
It does not work that way, not even legally. Just because a picture is online does not mean anyone is free to distribute it further. The legality of it depends on copyright and on TOS of places where it was uploaded originally.
ZoomZoomZoom 6y ago
>You're posting something publicly? To me that's explicit consent that you want people to see them. To see them where I posted them. Pictures are an intellectual property of the author, if a person wants other people to spread them, he/she needs to explicitly set the allowing license. Copyright, fair use and such is a hot and nuanced topic, but the bottom line here is that personal pictures getting shared is not what most people expect to happen, understandably so.
- quotemstr 6y ago
  > Pictures are an intellectual property of the author, if a person wants other people to spread them, he/she needs to explicitly set the allowing license. It's more complicated than that. What actions require a license? Nobody needs a license to create a hyperlink. The concept of a "link license" was a big subject of debate in the 1990s, but after much hand-wringing and heated discussion, we converged on a permissionless model for hyperlinking on the web. I think everyone here understands the high value of frictionless linking. Now let's suppose for the sake of argument (and without loss of generality) that this foot fetish site were just a list of hyperlinks to publicly available foot pictures in their original context. I suspect the author of the article (and a lot of other people) would still be squicked out by the foot-fetishist link-aggregator site. But what could be done about it? Permissioneless linking is a huge boon for the web and humanity. Should we add friction to linking just because foot fetish sites exist? Okay --- what if it's not linking, but actual photo embedding? Still, we'd need to examine the costs and benefits. Embedding public content in another context is great for commentary, synthesis, and other creative transformations. People love to showcase hard work and beauty. Should we add friction to photo embeds everywhere just because some squicky foot fetishists use embeds to aggregate images? Again, it doesn't seem worth it. Ultimately, we have to learn to let things go. There will always be people in the world who use public things in a "wrong" way: a politician you don't like may use your favorite song in a campaign; a company might use your open source library to make a product you'd prefer not to exist; or public property records might let speculators arbitrage prices in a way that seems unfair. But whenever we're tempted to Do Something about people using the public thing in the wrong way, we have to think "is this Doing Something going to be net positive? What about the value of the commons itself? Am I willing to destroy that just to Do Something about this one thing?" Most of the time, the answer is "no".
kenneth 6y ago
Alright then, for the sake of argument then how would you feel if there was a website named "wikipedo" where people take the normal photos of children posted on social media and aggregate them thusly with a vastly different intent?
- f1refly 6y ago
  Getting off to feet is generally considered weird but okay, getting off to children is not. Your comparison is not applicable.
- FDSGSG 6y ago
  That would be confusing, what would we call enthusiastic wikipedia users then?
- camillomiller 6y ago
  Getting off to feet is part of broader adult sexual freedom. You can’t compare it pedophilia, c’mon.
furyg3 6y ago
Sorry, but no. First there is the question of licensing. The users are posting (and site is hosting) images that they (presumably) don't have licenses to use or permission to post to that site. A photograph being publicly available does not put it in the public domain, and certainly doesn't mean that a site is licensed to run ads on it (though even without financial gain it would still not be legally ok). The very first site rule is "uploading copyrighted photos is forbidden unless you have permission from the copyright owner" which I presume is supposed to shield the site owner from this legal issue, but I think we can all agree that the vast majority of photos on this site do not meet this requirement. And secondly there is the question of context. I may give my employer permission to put my photo on their "About Us" page, but I would not be amused if the later transferred it to a "Consultants who we will never work with again" page.
- kevincox 6y ago
  I don't think the original poster is talking about licensing. It is an issue, but not unique to sites like this and not relevant to the parent's concerns. What if this site just linked to the photos instead? I think that would still make people uncomfortable and is not illegal. Context is the problem and it is unclear. In most countries you can't really prevent people from saying things about you. If someone wants to post online that they like you feet they are allowed to do so. I agree that when this is distilled to a database of people and their feet it feels a bit weird, but I struggle to find a point where it becomes not ok.
  - furyg3 6y ago
    I don't get why this is so tough. It's ok for someone to talk about how they like your feet... until the point where they start posting images of your feet without 'permission' (permission in the legal sense refers to licensing).
fxtentacle 6y ago
The law is quite clear on this. You're granting Instagram a license to display the image, so they are allowed to do that. Other websites aren't, unless you grant them a license, too. So the foot fetish website is infringing copyright. And the author of the image can sue them for damages. They can also ask ISPs to blacklist the page if they don't comply. Kind of all the stuff that the MPAA does when they find a movie rip on someone's server, the photographer could do here, too.
- boudin 6y ago
  What you say is right, but is about copyright, not consent. No social media collect the consent of people in the actual pictures when the person in the picture is not the one who is posting it.
- PurpleFoxy 6y ago
  What damages? Were you selling those feet pics?
freewilly1040 6y ago
Let’s say you have a LinkedIn profile picture, and someone posts that picture to a site about people who look like they might be pedophiles. Would you be ok with that?
- kevincox 6y ago
  That is very different. That is implying that you may be a pedofile which is unpleasant whether or not there is a photo and whether or no anyone else even sees it. This is saying that you have nice feet, which may make some people uncomfortable, and isn't necessary "right", but is completely different.
  - freewilly1040 6y ago
    It's unwanted attention on the internet. I think it's fine to make fun of people who look like pedopohiles (not saying you are a pedophile, that would be libel probably). Some people have a problem with it, but I don't, so what's the big deal?
kevincox 6y ago
A lot of the responses to this comments are focusing on licensing which I think is missing the interesting point of this thought. I agree that many of the images here are likely copyright infringement but this is not a new, unique or interesting problem. Imagine that instead of rehosting the images they just linked to the original source on social media. This is now legal, but is it "right" to aggregate images under this context?

theshrike79 6y ago

> TIL there's a wiki website for foot fetishists. Foot fetishists are SO common. If you don't count the boob & ass normies, foot fetishists are a clear number one in the fetish sector. I don't know if they're that common or they're just easy to cater to (taking a few pics of feet isn't a huge issue for anyone who makes a living on their looks).

adventured 6y ago

Is it ok to publish photos of celebrities, athletes or politicians (public persons broadly) in newspapers, news stories online, or in magazines, or on forums, or on Wikipedia? If so, then it's morally ok to upload these feet photos. What about by outlets that some people don't regard as being legitimate news, like MSNBC or Fox? Those sources often seem like fetish outlets, they sell crack to partisans who mentally masturbate all day long to outrage porn headlines. How about ESPN and athletes? They sell fetish obsession 24/7 to sports addicts of every possible variety. Fetishists obsessed with how tennis players grunt. You name it. WikiFeet apparently has an IMDB rule in terms of who may be published, which seems within the realm of being reasonable as a cut-off. And I strongly suspect that if the owner of eg Instagram photos that are being published on WikiFeet wanted them taken down for copyright reasons, WikiFeet would certainly comply with a simple email.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

fergie 6y ago

In my younger days I would probably have agreed with you OP. Now that I am older, I have come to appreciate the time, ambition, energy and reward that goes into being a public figure. I am also a bit wiser to the whole game of getting attention whilst pretending that you are not looking for it. I feel like the best way to deal with this situation is just to accept that its all OK. Its OK to be an young, rich, attractive white woman. Its OK to publish pics of yourself on instagram. Its OK to be into feet. Its ok to like and share public content that you find online. The message of the article is that its a bit weird, but its OK. Lets not be too quick to shame and judge. (The comments about Jennifer Aniston were interesting too- there is clearly a subtext here about the reach and power of women on these platforms, and again- this is all OK!)

yosito 6y ago
I'm not talking about public figures. > I feel like the best way to deal with this situation is just to accept that its all OK. It's not all ok. It's ok to be into feet. It's ok to be any age, race, class. It's ok to publish anything you want about yourself in any way you choose. I'm not judging or shaming any of those things. What's NOT ok is using/sharing someone's photos without their consent. In legal terms, it's likely a violation of copyright laws. In terms of morality/decency, it's a violation of respect for another person's boundaries.

somedude895 6y ago

> I noticed that wikiFeet has pretty strict rules about whose feet and what kinds of photos you can post. The person has to have an IMDb page to be fair game. Do you pay attention to those rules when you want to post someone like me, who isn’t as well-known? > Yeah. For example, a musician from England who performed barefoot, like I’ll find a picture I think is sexy, and I’ll put her name in IMDb. And she didn’t have a page, so I couldn’t post hers. But you did. I feel the same way, but this seems to me to be a rule to make sure that only pictures of people who have considerable public exposure to begin with are okay to be posted, which seems sensible to me.

vagrantJin 6y ago

> But the thing that really puts me off about this interview and the WikiFeet website is the lack of consent. A bit of a harsh, knee-jeek reaction to something entirely meaningless. Topped with a vague proposition of privacy in a public forum. It's just feet. Unless someone knows you, your "privacy" isn't likely to be in peril from a site filled with feet.

yosito 6y ago
It's not about the feet. It's about the lack of consent. It troubles me that you don't see a problem with that.
- mikem170 6y ago
  You used the word creepy to describe the wikifeet site, which might lead people to think that you are motivated by prudish reasons. From a legal consent perspective are you also opposed to google image search for the same reasons, that google did not get consent to redisplay the resulting images? What about pictures of public personas in news articles where consent was not given? Could I prevent my friends from posting unflattering pictures of me? What if I google images of feet to get off on? Maybe consent should apply to audio and written information, so people are not quoted out of context? The legalities around consent seem to get complicated, and conflict with other legal precedent. Also you might have a hard time convincing other people of the harm in feet pics, and that might be the first thing you need to do to get a law passed against it.

BTCOG 6y ago

While I'd agree that if he were sneaking into women's houses, snapping "candid" photos with no permission it would be one thing, but why do people entirely miss that this woman was posting all these pictures of her own feet on the internet? If anything, all this showcases in my opinion is how people share WAY too much personal info and then something like this can make them think twice about doing so.