Haagse Fiets Chic

22/04/2026

I want to thank everyone who participated in Haagse Fiets Chic over the years, particularly all my very willing and supportive photo subjects.

My intentions were always just to present a photo essay capturing a slice in time of The Hague and her residents as beautifully as I saw everyone on a bicycle riding past me. As someone who wasn't born and raised in this culture, I truly appreciate how beautiful and wonderful it is.

Sadly, I find myself at an uncomfortable cross roads now with META and Facebook, and after more than a decade, I must this gallery elsewhere do to political and legal reasons that intersects with my day job and career as a Linux, cybersecurity and privacy advocate.

META has become too big, and instead of rising to meet it's own responsibilities and accountability in policing it's own platform to prevent child abuse and other wrongs, it is instead putting it's own responsibility on governments around the world to make it a governmental problem & taxpayer funded solutions.... all while breaking the security models and architectures of Linux and other operating ystems.

I will not be a party to this, nor will I further encourage one drop of revenue towards this human rights privacy violation.

As such, I will leave Facebook within a month, and this gallery will go with it. I hate that I have to do it, but this is a reaction to what I see META is doing. I don't have much choice.

Again, thank you to all my wonderful fellow residents of The Hague. And I hope to see you on the streets of The Hague & eventually Haagse Fiets Chic will be resurrected elsewhere. Just not on META. It's too Zucked up here now.

I wish I didn't have to make a second video on this subject, but Linux is under attack again, now by the federal government of the United States of America. ...

25/05/2018

Everyone else has a GDPR statement, so maybe I should too. :)
I believe I'm exempt under the "artistic project" clause of the GDPR.

But in many ways, in both spirit and in practice, I believe I've honored the principles of the GDPR as a street photographer before there was a GDPR, and I will again use this opportunity to say the following:

If you find yourself appearing in my project and would like to be removed from this Facebook Gallery, please drop me a line personally and cite the photograph in question and I'll either untag you and/or delete the photograph, as per your request.

If you know me personally or have been following HFC for some time, you've probably already picked up on the fact, or already knew this already, but for those that are new and don't know it - I honestly have *no* desire to intrude on people's personal right to privacy... just the opposite in fact; my "day-job" and other passion concerns itself with protecting people's data privacy, and the preservation and advancement of that right.

And as an amateur street photographer, I think I'm on legally safe grounds producing an artistic work of my community members when they are in public (i.e.- not private) settings on their bicycles.

As an embodiment of this, the ethical guide-post which extends even further by which I publish each photo to Haagse Fiets Chic by is "What would I be okay with if my my neighbor were to photograph me on my bike and publish online?" I've always started from there and try to do better than that.

Even for me, that's kind of a "grey line". For instance, would I have appreciated it if someone had photographed me in the middle of the snowy night with freezing tears coming down my face as I cycled to the emergency veterinarian, knowing these were my cat's last days? Probably not at the time, but 7 years on, I'd love to have that theoretical photograph of myself now. Even still, for the majority of my subjects, I would still offer them the benefit of an additional 'privacy filter' and just choose not to photograph someone crying, or publish them crying, if it so happens I capture someone in the act. And that's just one of multiple example scenarios I can think of which do not meet my own internal bar / filter of "niet normaal" and just do not get published and/or deleted for said reason alone.

Hopefully that comes out in more than just my photos, as well as some things I just won't publish out of interest to / concern for the subjects; but also in my approach-ability on the street: If you notice me take a photo of you, and you're concerned by this, you don't have to be concerned / afraid of approaching me in person. You can even ask to see the photo, if I did succeed in capturing it, and if I did succeed (I don't always) in getting it, I'll be more than happy to show you then, re-shoot if you ask me too, or just delete it if that's what you really prefer.

Because at the end of the day, your friendship, your respect and your privacy is more important to me than it is important that your photo appear in Haagse Fiets Chic - which is nothing more than an artistic gallery showing off what I love about this city, and this country. :)

20/05/2018

Where did spring go?

20/05/2018

Sorry to see his bakfiets sign on the front got torn up. But good to see the bakfiets still works. :)

20/05/2018

Serene ’s-Gravenhage.

19/05/2018

Laughing up a storm.

19/05/2018

The Lady in Red. :)

19/05/2018

I really do like the modern redesign of Central Station, but hope city preserves the history & nostalgia of Holland Spoor Station.

01/05/2018

Life in the fast lane on a fiets in Den Haag.

01/05/2018

I feel like guys with long hair like me, who wear caps don’t have the same challenges I do. Maybe I should wear a cowboy hat. ;)