I received an email from a female web user whose photo had been posted in sajha. She was apparently not happy about it and that is very understandable. I sent her a short reply as follows, which I feel I need to expand upon a little bit since I have heard the same concerns from few other well wishers.

My reply:
Thank you for contacting us.
As social networks have sprung
up and have taken a mainstream stage in user experience thesedays, it has been
more challenging to maintain public discussion forums where is it getting more
difficult to draw the line between publicly available information and private
information. Most of the time, we have to rely on user diligence in order to
maintain the sanctity of private information.

Sajha.com is dedicated to
remove unwanted information from it's site and we will take care of your
request as soon as we received the direct address to your photo. If you are
not sure how to get the direct address to your image please right click on the
picture in question and select "properties" from the menu. Then it will show
you the URL or address of the image which you can send me.

Thank you
for your kind consideration and any inconvenience is
regretted.

Sincerely,
Admin, Sajha.com

In today's age of social networking, I think we have to be extra careful about who we add to our networks to be able to access our personal information. Because, if not sajha, there are hundreds of other sites where your private photo can be posted to. It is not possible to find out whether a posted picture is from a public site or from a person's private social networking page.

If some users want to post/share publicly available image from other public sites to any other public forums, it is fine as long as the image is not discriminatory, abusive or sexually explicit. A public forum is mostly about sharing public information and it is not technically feasible to verify whether or not a posted image is public or not. So, the burden lies upon educated users like ourselves to be extra careful on who we allow in our network to access our personal images.

In addition to photos, if you video is shared in public site like youtube - which encourage users to share the videos thru links and embed codes, you should not be surprised if your video is linked from or embedded in public discussion forum or any other sites. If you do not want your videos to be linked from other sites, your sole remedy is to not have it publicly available in public sites.

As far as sajha.com is concerned, and as some people may have hinted, sajha does not make any profit from any controversial threads that spring up once in a while. Advertisers do not base their decision to place ads in sajha by looking at one thread that accumulates higher hits than others, or if a certain person posts or not. In any case, as I have stated in my email, Sajha.com is dedicated to
remove unwanted information from it's site.

Thank you for being a part of this fun and helpful community!

Best wishes