Years ago I had some friends who worked in a local photo shop, and once I stopped by and they showed me around. This was in the days when 99% of the population

Years ago I had some friends who worked in a local photo shop, and once I stopped by and they showed me around. This was in the days when 99% of the population developed film and made prints by dropping off the little canisters at such shops with an order form. It usually took a few days to get them back. Everyone made assumptions that the process for developing photos was anonymous and private - you dropped off a canister, and picked up photos and negatives in a clean, sealed envelope a few days later. How wrong we were. The process was semi-automated using these gargantuan machines in a back room, but the staff usually looked at each frame as went through the process. They made extra copies of spicy ones which went straight into a special binder kept on a nearby shelf. This shop had two or three of these binders. Some years later I was in another country and photographed violent demonstrations right outside the hostel where I was staying. When I went to pick up the photos, the staff made it clear that they had seen the images. They were supportive (they wanted to get the word out internationally) but what if copies had been sent to the local intelligence services instead? Nowadays the tech is different, but when there are no barriers to viewing private information, we see similar types of behavior.