Blake Miller of Fast Company has this chilling article:

Jenny had become a victim of a growing—and to many, alarming—new community that exists primarily on Instagram: baby role-players. Instagram users like Nikki steal images of babies and children off the Internet, give them a new name, and claim them as their own. Sometimes they create entire fake families.

The sad thing is there is relatively little protection to be had from the law in situations like this. You may be able to sue someone using your likeness in a commercial venture without your permission, but non-commercial use of the nature described above is rarely protected in the same way.

Instagram users should review their privacy settings by reading the company’s help pages about controlling your visibility and setting photos and video as viewable only to approved followers.

Keep this in mind, though: even if you set your content as private, sharing a link to a photo or video on a social network like Twitter or Facebook will allow anyone with that link to view it.

People who do steal your photos and pretend they’re your child or your child’s parent are violating Instagram’s Terms of Service, which prohibits impersonation, among other things (emphasis mine):

You must not defame, stalk, bully, abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate people or entities […]

The Fast Company article to which I link above includes a statement from Instagram that the company does remove the stolen images when users report such activity.

This story is another lesson to be mindful of not only what you share online, but how you share it. After all, a private company like Instagram could simply choose to ignore concerns like these, and users would have no recourse. Social networks can be a rich and vibrant way to stay in touch, but we are all responsible for what and how we share.

This profile of Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley by Austin Carr at Fast Company does a great job of humanizing the app and its maker.

That’s probably because the man behind the location-sharing and, more recently, stuff-to-do discovery app, has put so much of himself into Foursquare. There are many profiles written about business and tech personalities, but few intrigued as much as this one does.

I think it’s because Carr really communicates how Crowley is finding himself at a cross-roads not only with Foursquare as a company, but with his life’s direction and essence.

This is a great article on patent drawings and models, as selected for Co.Design by Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan.

Austin Carr, writing at Fast Company's Co.Design blog:

It’s actually proved to be a more modern and nimble alternative to many of its mainstream counterparts, and boasts many novel features that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, even with its beautiful redesign of Outlook, should all heed lessons from.

His review has some images and a really good explanation of how Alto feels. Fast Company's Adam Bluestein spoke with Alto's team leads, and that article is also worth a look.

The articles compare Alto to Pinterest, but it looks to me more like Evernote, with note titles and summaries on the left and notebooks in a larger “stack” layout pane on the right. Regardless, it looks elegant and functional, which is what I want from websites and apps. I’m really impressed by how it looks and the philosophy behind what they did, including empowering an insular team to build it outside of Aol’s larger structure.

In fact, Alto looks so well-designed that, if I was in charge at Aol, I probably would have had them launch without much of a mention of Aol at all. It’s unfortunate but true that the Aol brand is really a handicap to anyone trying to do something as bold as redesigning how we use email. Some people may see “Alto, by Aol” and skip it altogether. I almost did.

Alto works with many popular email services, including Gmail, so I’m excited to see how it works. You can request an invite here. I’ll write something more in-depth when I get the chance to try it out.

Kevin Purdy, formerly of Lifehacker fame, shares the morning strategies of several people in this Fast Company article. I have never liked the empty proclamations of Tony Robbins and his ilk, but the rest of the article is interesting.