Sandy victims will be able to find their lost photos online

More than a month has passed since Hurricane Sandy hit the east coast of the United States. Thousands of people lost their homes and most of their personal belongings as a result of the disaster, and far from all of them decided to return to the rubble. Many have chosen to permanently leave the affected areas, such as Union Beach in New Jersey.

Jeanette Van Houghton also lost all her possessions, but decided to stay. Moreover, together with several like-minded people, she organized a project that aims to help victims recover their photos from family albums. On the technical side, there is nothing remarkable about this initiative, but it perfectly reflects the way the digital media era is changing our usual notions of photo storage, collaboration, and ... privacy.
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Over the past weeks, van Houghton and several other volunteers have been collecting photos from the ruins of the houses at Union Beach. More than half of the images found were seriously damaged or altered beyond recognition, but many of the photos remained in acceptable condition. They are carefully scanned, combined into albums with names like “Found on Third Street at the Turn” and uploaded to Facebook.


One of the photos found and scanned.

The process of the search and processing of images interested in Mary Danielson, a specialist in genealogy. According to her, she simply could not stay away from this initiative, which is also of professional interest to her: “This is a kind of research - is it possible to recreate a photo collection of a whole city?”

More than 3,000 photos have already been posted to the Facebook group; about ten thousand more are waiting for the scan. Van Houghton hopes that most of the pictures will be recognized and returned to their current owners. Her project has already received more than $ 2,000 on the gofoundme.com crowdfunding site, and they are interested in the press.

Most of the photos posted are no different from those that are usually posted on the Internet, but are unique in the sense that, together, they represent a collective portrait of the residents of Union Beach that has been created for decades.

Without questioning the good intentions of the project initiators, however, one cannot exclude the possibility that some of the published photos may be compromising and their owners would not like to see them in the public domain. There is no effective solution to this problem at the moment, which once again raises the question of respecting the confidentiality of data posted on social networks. In a world that is rapidly making our lives more and more open to others, the best way to avoid the leakage of unwanted information is the very absence of such.