A password for the holiday photographs

Text: an original contemporary advice-column-style practice extract.

The holiday photographs did not contain a secret. They contained a beach, three badly framed sunsets and my brother blinking beside a statue. That made it easy to send the album link to everyone in the family. It made it equally easy to forget that the link could travel farther than the family.

You do not need to imagine a stranger plotting in a dark room to reconsider such a link. Ask simpler questions. Who can open it? Can a recipient forward it? Does the album show a child’s name beside a school badge? These questions do not prove that harm will occur. They identify what you have chosen to make available. If your service allows it, restrict access to named recipients and review the pictures before sharing them.

I still share photographs. I have not replaced my phone with a locked drawer. But I now check the audience as carefully as I check whether somebody has their eyes shut. Privacy is not a demand to have nothing to say. It is the ordinary work of deciding who you are saying it to, repeated whenever a convenient button offers to decide for you.

In this extract, the writer tries to persuade readers to take digital privacy seriously without making them panic.

Evaluate how successfully this is achieved. Support your views with detailed reference to the extract.