Friends are worse than paparazzis, says Atticus. With access to our intimate personal lives and never without a digital camera to hand, they snap us at all the worst moments – generally when we're looking awful – and gleefully post all these images up online for all to see. Just because they don't get paid for it doesn't make it right. I'm seriously considering demanding a media blackout.

In my last rant, I questioned whether it was wise that we're giving corporations like Google and Facebook so much of our personal information. They're in it for themselves, after all, and that doesn't necessarily mean they're in it for us – one example being the unauthorised use of a photo of married woman Cheryl Smith in a "hot singles" dating-site advert on Facebook. Not something her husband Peter Smith was very happy about when the advert was targeted at him.

But whatever lengths each of us goes to to keep our images from being used in this way, we can't stop our friends undoing all our hard work with a few snaps of a shutter and clicks of a mouse – posting images far and wide on photography websites and social networking sites.

What chance do I have of keeping some semblance of privacy when the pictures Clouseau took of me on our last trip to Spain are now flying around cyberspace? In reality, I can't very well call up every friend and tell each one to delete all photos of me from their online photo albums (which, anyway, doesn't stop many of these social networking sites keeping hold of them on their servers to unleash later – though why they would want a picture of me in a turkish bath is, at the moment, beyond me).

Well, I guess I just miss the good old days when photos of you resided in one of two places – one, the "still to sort" pile of photos in the odds and sods drawer or, two (and at worst), a dusty photo album that got pulled out once a year to be laughed at.