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

The controversial topic of San = Nas has been propagated for a very long time, and I see some users assume that Nas is the admin. Here is a thread on the fact that San = Admin and Nas is not San and Nas is not admin, he is a regular user who enjoys the freedom of speech in sajha.com

http://sajha.com/sajha/html/openthread.cfm.cfm?StartRow=1&PageNum=1&forum=2&threadid=63607#633368

SAN ra NAS ko arko natak.....................
U guys sucks.

SAN,Thanks for ur attention regarding the matter, but I am really very surprised why it took u solong to respond! It was pretty obvious from the postings of users on the thread "Never Seen NepaliBeauties" that some of the pics were uploaded from social networking sites like Facebook and hi5, and most probably without the consent of the owner of the pics. There were also comments from the people who annonomously posted the pics from Facebook or hi5 or similar other sites that they had the right to do so, since the pics are from a public and social networking sites. However, as u also know, it isnot true. Even though they are on public sites, only those sites have the right to distribute the contentsof the sites, including pics, to any third party, and I surely dont think some of us, Sajha USers, didget the permission.Anywyas, better late than never, thank you for your concern, and sincerely hope that you will remainvigilant and act faster in the future in regards to such matter.HappyFace.

San,

Just a thought, but, why do you need the direct address of the picture. Most of the pictures posted were prolly 'right click and Save ased' and then uploaded (from the include file option) manually. I think giving out their direct addresses further compromises their identity.

:D

have a good day.

Dekchi, that answer was specific to the specific query since the email did not specify which image she was concerned about, so instead of guessing which one or have her send me the link to the whole thread itself, I asked her to send me the direct link to the image so I know exactly which one it is :) 

Have a good evening!

San dai,

I am also concerned with the recent photos uploaded in sajha. I don't blame sajha or its admin for that. If its not in sajha then it wud have been in other forum.

But the thing is I am not happy with the posting of thread in same catagory KURAKANI. I request you to make another Catogory like "mature content" and allow to post such contents. I want to use sajha even from my University. So I dont want to get embarrased in front of others for opening threads that contains nudity.

San dai, i think you understood what i intended to say.

Regards,
AE