You know those embarrassing photos people like to post on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook? Well, someone’s figured out a way to make money off them.

YoBusted is a site that allows people to post compromising photos of their friends for all the world to see. The only way for those friends to get them removed is to pay a monthly membership fee of $19.99. For those who find themselves getting ‘busted” frequently, the site offers an annual membership package for $49.99.

Now I haven’t actually seen the site yet. As I write this, it’s showing up as “under construction. This may or may not have anything to do with all the publicity the site has been getting in recent days, including a Businessweek article.

The story says YoBusted has run afoul of Facebook, with several users complaining that photos have been taken from their profile pages without consent.

On one level, YoBusted is only the latest reminder of the lack of privacy in the age of digital cameras, the Web, and social media that make it easy for compromising photos to make their way around the world in seconds.

A big question is whether or not this qualifies as extortion. As with most things in the legal world, it’s not always easy to define.

Anyone hoping to bring legal action against YoBusted may need to demonstrate that its “business model is being driven by fear of exposure,” says Laurence Pulgram, partner in the intellectual property and technology litigation group at Silicon Valley law firm Fenwick & West. In that case, “there are real potential claims that could be made,” Pulgram says. The bar is high for proving allegations of extortion, a criminal offense that’s typically thought of as threatening to commit an injurious act to someone to get them to pay or give up some property.