Hidden Risks of Using Photos in Business
With an estimated 298 million current smartphone users in the U.S. in 2021, it’s only a matter of time until their use in the workforce will start to pose a risk to businesses. Phones equipped with cameras have the ability to capture information rich photos and add a growing medium of communication through videos.
Photos and videos have the potential to positively increase communication, capture progress, document work, and add a new medium of communication and experience. However, if overlooked, they also have the potential to pose a risk, or perhaps, these businesses are already at risk, they just don’t realize it yet.
One of my prior roles at a large global financial institution was serving as a member on a business and product risk committee. Each quarter we would meet to identify components applying the traditional SWOT analysis to identify areas of concern to both the business and our products. One of the benefits of a large corporation is there are many processes implemented to both attempt to mitigate risk and to look for new opportunities.
Now that I’m in a different industry, I find myself applying some of the same institutional principles to my business. After talking with people anywhere from a small business owner to a larger corporate director, I’ve compiled a list of potential risks that businesses should evaluate both if they are currently using photos and videos and if they have not yet implemented photos and videos into their communication or operations.
While I’ll be presenting areas as they relate to risk, as you review these, I encourage you to think about your business and perhaps think about how ‘visual communication’ and the use of photos and videos can be a strength, weakness, opportunity, or threat to your business. It’s estimated that 90% of the entire U.S. workforce will have a smartphone equipped with a camera by the end of 2022. Now is a great time to think about how employees, and your business, can reduce risk and identify ways to improve, and perhaps, grow your business.
Legal Liability
Do you know the laws of using photos and videos in your business? You may have not realized this, but there are currently a lot of laws that address the possession, use, and ownership of images including photos and videos. And to complicate matters, these laws can vary by country, state, and industry.
The first way to address business risk is to simply take a step to better inform yourself around the basics of these visual assets. Some questions to ask while exploring information: Who owns the photos, the business or the person who captured them? Who has rights to use the images? What liability is there for possessing the files? Is there personal information associated with the images including data or the likeness of people, or minors where some locations have some very strict privacy rights with severe penalties.
Begin your evaluation by first understanding where and how photos are stored and used. Then begin to write a policy for the processes and procedures to follow when capturing, sending, saving, using, and sharing.
Exposing Client or Sensitive Information
Did you know that most images captured with a smart phone, contain details like the GPS location, name of the person who took the photo, and personal device information in the image metadata? If you simply emailed a photo to me I could quickly extract that information that you may be unwilling sharing with me.
When sending photos, consider what may be embedded in that image both in the image data and the image itself. Consider if your client would have concern about you sharing a location or perhaps information in the images itself like design, structure or perhaps some intellectual property. While you may have been granted permission to take some photos, your client may not want some things shared with others.
Getting Permission to Capture or Use Images
On that note, it’s important to ask for permission on a few fronts including permission to capture photos and videos, permission to save or store them, and finally, permission to use them in any other ways not within agreed context.
Discuss with your team, or anyone representing or capturing photos on behalf of your business, a proper procedure for taking photos of a jobsite, a project, product, or people. Incorporating a simple process for attaining proper permission or using a system that incorporates acquired permission for you, can save you misunderstandings or headaches later.
Saving Photos on Personal Devices
For many companies, the process of capturing photos is somewhat typical. An employee or business partner will use their personal device, usually a smartphone, and will capture a few photos of the project, which are then immediately saved to their personal device’s image library. They will then email those images to others for viewing. Yet those original images, at times containing sensitive information, will remain on a personal device going forward.
This scenario poses a few different risks and challenges for the business. Storing business property or information on personal devices, especially if they are not always secured, is typically a bad business practice. The information may be sensitive, may be a risk to the business, or clients, if the employee uses them in an unauthorized way. There is also a risk of losing business images if stored on an employees’ phone. The employee could leave, purchase a new phone without transferring all images to the new device, or accidentally delete images resulting in images that are likely lost indefinitely.
In the end, the approach to mitigate these risks is simple. Incorporate a business solution that provides a centralized location for saving images and a process to immediately save images to that location. Encourage, if not mandate the process, and don’t allow employees to save images to their personal devices.
No Established Process in Operations
W. Edwards Deming, an American Scientist, once said, “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.” As I’ve worked with businesses and their use of photos and videos, I’ve learned most do not have a formalized process of how to use and handle image files used in day-to-day communication.
Within most companies, to send images, some of the employees will text them to team peers while others send images attached to email. For saving images, a few teams will save images to a shared drive in an ad hoc directory, some will keep photos on their personal device’s library, and the rest will leave the images in their text message or as attachments to email in their local inbox.
If you want to run an efficient business, it’s imperative you establish as many processes as possible. Incorporating a system on how teams capture, send, and save image files will be good for your business in multiple ways and will continue to be of value as use of images by teams continue to grow.
Wasting Time Searching
While lost time by itself may not be viewed as a risk, perhaps loss of productivity is. Digging through your library or tracking down some images may simply seem like a pain, over time, these seconds and minutes do add up. It’s just a matter of ‘time’ until loss of productivity grows with employees searching for images as use of images by companies increases coupled with the growing number of ways images are used.
At first, trucking may not seem to be a likely application for photos. However, someone recently reached out to me and explained a simple way they are using photos to mitigate their business risk. After a truck driver stationed a trailer at a dock, the driver takes a picture and emails it to someone in operations who then manually saves the image to their system. After evaluating the application, I was able to determine that, over time, by saving each truck drive, and the recipient 30 seconds a day, they could incorporate an automated process at a net $0 cost and mitigate both business and human error risk in the process.
Saving Photos Long-Term
Did you know that under GDPR guidelines for those operating business in Europe, you are only allowed to store photos that contain personal information only as long as you need to. Obviously there may be room for interpretation on this.
While you may not currently have business operations in Europe, it’s likely that the U.S. will adopt regulations that further help to protect individual rights of their personal information and data and that you may want to consider thinking about a plan and way to properly manage, and remove, unneeded photos and videos. For more information on GDPR compliance, you can read our post, “Five Things to Consider with Photos and GDPR Compliance”.
Who Owns the Image?
To some, it may seem that an image being captured during work hours, belongs to the business. If an employee takes a personal call while, ‘one the clock’, does the business have rights to that conversation? What about situations where the employee may claim to be on break, or ‘it’s my phone, so that’s my image’? In fact, if they capture an image with their personal phone, the metadata will tell you that they are, in fact, the author.
If you are not aware, rights are a huge thing with photos. And just because photos may be a day-to-day part of your business, doesn’t mean that some of them couldn’t be very valuable by themselves.
When setting up a process for handling your images, one simple approach is to set up a system that automatically grants you rights, and ownership, of those images. You may also want to consider including terms in your employee agreements that images captured and submitted are property of the business. However, the easiest way to do this is to incorporate rights and ownership into your standardized workflow.
Bonus: Hidden Risks of NOT Using Photos (and New Opportunities)
While I’ve touched on some of the risks that photos may pose to business, I’d like to offer up a few areas that may pose a risk but can also be used as opportunities to the business.
Showcasing Work or Experience
Maybe you’ve had a prospect ask to see some relevant examples of your past work. Or, perhaps you were in a conversation with someone, and then started to scroll through 100’s of photos in your phone’s library to find an image of your work.
If it was easy to find and share these images, would you be able to close a couple more deals by showcasing not just one, but perhaps multiple examples of relevant work. Establishing a structured and organized way to save and find your images may help you to close more deals.
Communicating with Clients
If you have recently placed an order with Amazon, you likely have received a photo showing you that your package was delivered and where it was delivered. I personally like and appreciate this service. In fact, I would now be surprised and feel somewhat less informed about my delivery. Yet, just three years ago this process did not exist. If you are not currently using photos to better communicate with your clients, the risk to your business is not if your competition will use them, but when they will.
You may not currently use photos (or videos) in your process for servicing your clients. But, could you increase your clients’ experience with your service or products? Are there ways to better inform or involve them in the process to further solidify their affinity for your brand? Don’t just think about what is required, but consider adding a way to communicate with visuals to go beyond expectations and wow your clients.
Gen Y and Gen Z Employees
It’s estimated that the Y and Z generations will make up 55% of the U.S. workforce by 2025. While just about every member of these generations will bring a smartphone to their workplace, inherently carrying the noted risks above, there are also great opportunities here.
Gen Y and Gen Z employees were not only raised in multi-media environments with inclusion of photos and videos, these mediums have also been exhaustively used in their communication. Much like the telephone revolutionized communication for generations before us, photos and videos will be extensively used in business communication.
Failure to embrace these forms of communication in your daily business operations, will not only fail to leverage the value photos and videos can bring, but will also isolate these generations and their desire to communicate in ways they have for their entire lives. If you incorporate visual communication in your workflow, you will also be shaping their environment to communicate in ways that they use in their personal lives.
Another way to view your business is from the younger customers’ perspective including our article on “Why Images Matter to Gen Z Customers”.
Conclusion
If members of your team, or your business, is currently capturing or using photos, there are inherent risks to consider. I encourage you to have a good understanding of how they are created, stored, sent, shared and organized. From there start to formalize and implement a plan, even if that plan starts with the basics. After you have a plan implemented, consider the best ways to optimize your images, not just to mitigate risk, but to use them in productive ways to add value to your business, improve team collaboration, and increase communication with your clients.
This article is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal advice. Please consult with an attorney for legal guidance. Photo by Michael Shannon on Unsplash
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