There was a slightly surreal version of a similar story published to BuzzFeed some time ago http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/i-followed-my-stolen-iphone-a...

So when they sync with iCloud wouldn't the monk get their photos?

A similar thing happened to me when I lost a phone in Vietnam. I ended up having to remotely nuke the phone in order to stop the photos when a few images came through of a family visiting a grave. Too creepy.

I wonder how common/repeatable this is, and what the minimum requirements are for a device to get picked up and used this way. It might be an interesting art project for someone to plant a few tens of cheap smartphones around, assuming we could reasonably expect at least several of them to broadcast interesting slices of people's lives.

I was thinking the exact same thing

The lack of any apparent attempt at reconfiguring/personalising a device you find and don't intend to return, but instead what seems to be just regular use, must be due to a very different attitude/knowledge about computers in general. It's a very interesting story though.

This idea of returning things you found does not exist everywhere. I know places where if you found something you would look up and thank the heavens for looking out for you today. You would not think that someone lost something, but rather that someone upstairs brought you a gift.

Interesting in a voyeuristic way. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to "tap in" to someone else's photos across the world, in exchange for making your own photos available for one and only one other person to tap into? Like a one-way chatroulette for photos.

This exists, it's called Rando.

EDIT: was, apparently it was killed after some guy wrote a script to spam the same image.

Was it by any chance a certain ahem iconic piece of artwork from 4chan?

This guy is posting someone else's private photos on the internet, without the person's knowledge or consent. That's not cool.

Someone else's private photos. Taken on a stolen iPod. Using stolen credentials.

I fail to see how these photos are private.

Two wrongs don't make a right?

You act as though you could apply some simple legal test to this essentially ethical question. I think it's very hard to make an ethical case for sharing photos someone made (with an extremely high likelihood of) not knowing they would be public for entertainment purposes.

Private photos are private photos, even if made by a thief and they don't suddenly become public because the thief accidentally shares them with someone. When I accidentally share photos with someone I sure hope they would tell me about it and not share them with the world.

The author openly acknowledges they left the phone behind by mistake in a position where they weren't able to attempt to retrieve it, and we have absolutely no reason to assume any ill-intent on the part of the teenage monk that appeared to have started using it weeks later.

(Though, that said, I suspect that monk in question would be unlikely to be especially upset to find the photos online, having quite happily posed for plenty of photos with falangs who presumably had their own cameras anyway.)

I aggre, the monk has clearly "chosen" to share them to the writer.

The monk has a number of options:

1. Reset the iPod(which he cant do cause it requires an appleId password),

2. Dont take pictures with the Ipod.

3. Disable icloud sync.(i think one can do that with out authentication)

4. Dont use the Ipod.

5. Use it and share the pictures.

He has clearly "chosen" nr 5.

I know this is controversial but in my mind if you fuck up it is up to you to "fix" it. It's capitalism.

"the monk has clearly "chosen" to share them to the writer"

Even if you accept that, it doesn't mean it's not a dick move to share the photos on the internet.

Think about the photos you've shared with friends. Would you be happy if all of them were made available to everyone in the world?

My ethical view on this is that in general (but not always) you need explicit consent before you publish the photograph of someone. Just having access to the photos (in this case it’s probably still the monk who has the copyright to those photos, but that’s a trickier question, but certainly also another potential angle to look at this) or even having copyright to the photos is not enough.

That’s also not an altogether uncommon view. In Germany it’s codified into law, for example.

There should obviously be exceptions to this and some are really easy to come up with (political events or demonstrations or all kinds of public events in general), with others it gets trickier, but most if not all of the monk’s photos shouldn’t be exceptions.

Also, many of those photos have more people than the monk in them, so it’s not like you could frame this as some sort of punishment of a thief. The other people are just as affected!

It wasn't stolen, it was lost and found. [1]

And for the credentials part, you're assuming a certain amount of technical knowledge and interest for iPod features beyond the basics.

[1] Relevant, from this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10247974

Desire to protect ones intellectual property is still a thing which leads to dukkha.

Sorry, I don't think you have much of a right to expect privacy when using someone else's iPod without permission.

In the UK, if you find something of value, you can take to the police station. The police give you a receipt. If no one has claimed the item after some period of time (3-6 months?) then you can go back and collect it. You did your best.

Let's say I come into possession of an iPod touch that way. Should I still have no right to privacy?

I feel we should be more productive and focus on finding a way for the owner to get a message to the monk instead of debating copyright...

You can use iCloud to send messages to your devices, it should be easy enough: http://osxdaily.com/2011/11/18/send-a-message-to-an-iphone-i...

Nice attitude (and gift of pictures ) on loosing your ipod !

Interesting situation. I really hate this kind of writing though because I wish it would just start with "I lost my ipod touch and now some guy is using it to post pictures on my timeline" instead of being mysterious and trying to build suspense.

Maybe I'm too impatient.