Tag: flickr

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Many tech companies are rushing to arrange compliance with GDPR, Europe’s new data protection regulations. What I have seen landing in my inbox thus far is not encouraging. Like with Facebook, other platforms clearly struggle, or hope to get away, with partially or completely ignoring the concepts of informed consent and unforced consent and proving consent. One would suspect the latter as Facebooks removal of 1.5 billion users from EU jurisdiction, is a clear step to reduce potential exposure.

Where consent by the data subject is the basis for data collection: Informed consent means consent needs to be explicitly given for each specific use of person related data, based on a for laymen clear explanation of the reason for collecting the data and how precisely it will be used.
Unforced means consent cannot be tied to core services of the controlling/processing company when that data isn’t necessary to perform a service. In other words “if you don’t like it, delete your account” is forced consent. Otherwise, the right to revoke one or several consents given becomes impossible.
Additionally, a company needs to be able to show that consent has been given, where consent is claimed as the basis for data collection.

Instead I got this email from Twitter earlier today:

“We encourage you to read both documents in full, and to contact us as described in our Privacy Policy if you have questions.”

and then

followed by

You can also choose to deactivate your Twitter account.

The first two bits mean consent is not informed and that it’s not even explicit consent, but merely assumed consent. The last bit means it is forced. On top of it Twitter will not be able to show consent was given (as it is merely assumed from using their service). That’s not how this is meant to work. Non-compliant in other words. (IANAL though)

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I’ve been using Flickr to store photos since March 2005. It’s at the same time an easy way to embed photos in my blog without using up storage space in the hosting account, and an online remote back-up. Over the years I’ve uploaded some 24.000 photos, though I’ve been using Flickr less in the last 2 years.

My account is from just before the moment Yahoo bought Flickr from its founders, which was also in March 2005, and it forced me to create a Yahoo account for it in 2007. Yahoo never seemed to have much vision for Flickr, but as an early user (Flickrs was founded in 2004) the original functionality I signed up and paid for was all I really needed.

Yahoo has been bought by Verizon last year, and since then it was likely they’d sell some parts of it. SmugMug has acquired Flickr last week, and that at least means that photography is now the main focus again. That hopefully means further evolution of Flickr, or it might mean a switch to SmugMug in the future.

Tellingly one needs to accept the new terms of service by 25th May 2018, which is the day the EU data protection regulation GDPR enters into force.

It also means that I will be able to delete my Yahoo account, which I only had because Flickr users were forced to.
Yahoo is an internet dinosaur, launched in 1994. Its best days already lie way back. Deleting my Yahoo account as such is also an end of an era, an end that felt long overdue for years already.

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Adding metadata to stuff can be a pain in your proverbial back-end. Especially if you, like me, take a lot of pictures, but do not own a camera that adds GPS coords automatically for you.
Lucky for me, the guys at Sumaato Labs (based in Hamburg, Germany) have made my life geotagging photos in Flickr a whole lot easier. Because they’ve built the Localize Bookmarklet
Here is how it works. You drag the bookmarklet to your toolbar (Firefox) or bookmarks (IE).
Open up a Flickr photo page.

Hit the bookmarklet…..and you’ll get Google Maps right there in your Flickr page.

Search your location. And put the arrow where you want it.

Save, while adding a little description if you want.

And now the geodata is stored in three places. Under the pic, in the tags, and in the Flickr Additional Info section. Cool! Don’t you just love AJAX and API’s when it’s used like this?
Another elegant feature: it remembers the last location you used for geotagging. Because your next picture is more likely to have been taken near there.

Oh and one more thing. I really miss the geotagging feature in Plazes for Flickr photos (as Plazes already know where I am/was, I could skip the interaction with a map.)

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In the past week a storm raged through Flickr, in the past weeks and months we’ve seen a couple more already.
I’d think that Flickr would not have many feet left to shoot themselves in. Apparantly Yahoo’s lawyers (whom I guess are the initiatiors of these cock-ups) however are good at finding more feet for Flickr to keep shooting.

First let me mention a couple of ‘minor’ issues that we saw recently.
The smallest one was making it mandatory to have a Yahoo-ID to use Flickr. This upset the community because they don’t see themselves as a Yahoo customer but a Flickr customer. Confusing your customers with mixing your different brands is not a good idea.

Being Cut Off if You Stand Out
Last month there was the removal of a photo and comments of Rebekka Godleifsdottir without warning. Presumably because some people in the comments uttered threats to a UK company that had been violating Godleifsdottirs copyright. Also apparantly this got to the attention of Flickr staff because of the high number of page views and comments the photo attracted. They in the end admitted their mistake and apologized.
Recently Flickr changed the way content is categorized and filtered.

From now on Flickr users should actively moderate their own content. Which in itself is not too much to ask. But the thing is they ask me to mark photo’s that might be insulting or unprudent to a ‘global’ audience as moderate or even restricted. This can be interpreted as a call to moderate everything according to the smallest common denominator. My pictures that show women e.g. talking to males that are not their relatives in public will certainly feel offensive to some people. But of course that is unenforceable, as Flickr staff well know.
I received a cheery message my account was considered ‘safe’, as if that should make my day. But what was irritating that suddenly I saw greyed out pictures when visiting friends’ photo streams.

Switching off the ‘Safety Filter’ that Flickr provides me with as a great new functionality, which they default to Safe (which means their default is to not let you decide to see less information, but let you decide to see more information. A plain weird standpoint in the age of information abundance/overflow), showed that the filtered out stuff consisted of screenshots and graphics. The kind of thing they filtered out of public search before, because Flickr is a photo-site.

Other users however saw their entire account being flagged ‘Restricted’. Without notice, and with very slow response as to why it happened, and how to change it. In the linked case, the trigger again seems to be a response to a) complaints, but apparantly without checking the validity b) a high number of views and comments (as if that alone indicates something dodgy. Seems like projection on the side of the Flickr Staff to me: only naughty stuff attracts eyeballs). That is a repeating pattern so it seems.

Again Flickr admitted their mistake, and apologized, but again it took decisive action on behalf of the customer.
So we have as a pattern:
If you attract attention, you’ll be flagged as suspect.
If we change something, we won’t tell you first, but wait until you complain.
We are slow to respond.

Dumping PayPal and Other Payment Woes
Yahoo is promoting their own payment system (Yahoo Wallet) which supports creditcards only (at least outside the US). A lot of European users do not own a credit card, because you can do almost anything with your debitcard across the entire continent, and yearly fees for credit cards are often high. That is why PayPal is popular, as you can connect it to your bank account.
But they’ve cut PayPal as a payment option. Again without warning. Leaving scores of users without credit card with no way to continue their Pro account by paying through PayPal. And without time to arrange a different solution, because there was no warning the service would be cut.

Also those that use the Portuguese language version of Flickr, suddenly find themselves left with using a Brazilian e-banking option only to pay. Which of course is entirely logical if you live in Portugal, isn’t it?
Confusing languages with countries is a major no-no guys. Useability 101.

Offering Localized Versions with Easter Egg
The really big issue this week is the start of localized versions. While the official blog was extolling the parties around the launch, and how the Flickr team was jetting around the world, the users in Germany, Hong Kong, Singapore and Korea found a little easter egg in those localized versions: they cannot decide their own Safety Filter settings. It is on Safe always, if you have a Yahoo ID based in those countries.

Of course this means that those Swiss and Austrian users that created a German Yahoo ID because they wanted to enjoy a German speaking site, now also see their filters in Flickr being locked in Safe mode. Confusing languages with nations again. This means ‘flowers and landscapes only’ for the German speaking users. Even for your own photo’s. Meanwhile Yahoo’s stockholders rejected a principled stand on censorship.
Again, this change was effected without warning. Again response has been extremely slow when users started to complain. German users demand to know what the legal basis is for this decision, but only get vague indications (e.g. age verification is mentioned) that don’t make much sense at all (except that they seem to be taken pro-actively out of fear, real or imagined). An action accusing Flickr of widespread censorship ensued.

Until now Flickr staff only let their customers know how painfull it is to them, and how sorry they feel, but no tangible information as to reasons why is forthcoming.


(censorship has been a hot tag in the past week on Flickr)

It all boils down to this, from my viewpoint:

  • Flickr is currently treating their customers as objects, whereas the customers see themselves and Flickr staff as a community.
  • Flickr is taking measures without informing their customers, or giving them a chance to prepare for those changes.
  • Flickr is stonewalling requests for information.

Meanwhile customers are considering their options, putting uploading on hold, and moving away to other services (such as the Danish 23 and Zoomr)
Flickr, in short, is flushing their brand down the drain. Or rather Yahoo is, as Flickr staff seem to feel predominantly sorry for themselves at this point.

(a good overview, if you read German, of what is going on in the German blogosphere can be found at Sprechblase, by Cem Basman from Hamburg)

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Yesterday Björn Kolbeek pointed me to Photosynth of Microsoft Live Labs. It is a technology that stitches photo’s from different sources together to create 3D representations of actual locations. You would be able to fly through a 3D world, entering through a photo on any website and flying out to another website through any of the other photo’s that constitute the 3D rendering.

It was presented at the SIGGRAPH 2006 conference, which is being held this week in Boston, USA. Techcrunch also has an article.

The cool part of this app is not that the idea to create a 3D representation of something is new or unique. We’ve had panoramic virtual tours for quite some time already. What is unique though is that it builds on the multitude of contributions of internet users all over the world. Imagine it not only using all photo sites like Flickr, 23, and the like, but also each and every photo that is used on any site somewhere.

This kind of visual representation would also be another great and important building block in combining the geographic landscape with the information landscape that is the internet. In the video on the Photosynth website one of the suggestions of use, next to virtual tourism or checking out venues beforehand, is to be able to find out the exact location of a building you photographed but don’t remember where. Simply by ‘diving into’ your own photo published on Flickr, you would find yourself ‘inside’ the panorama stitched together from everybody’s photo’s of that spot. Step through the looking glass, if you dare. It also reminds me of the mirrors in the Mordant’s Need SF books by Stephen Donaldson.

And what if we take our imagination one step further? What if we use these 3D rendered locations as ‘wall paper’ for virtual worlds such as Second Life, or the VRML based Traveler. I would really enjoy being able to invite Jon Husband to the virtual version of my favourite local restaurant La Cuisine where we dined together in 2004, or to Elmine’s and my coffee and cake hang-out SamSam, or for beers at my preferred watering hole De Boemel, to have our Skype conversation, or my home office even. It allows me to share imagery and atmosphere from my daily surroundings, reinforcing our mutual perception and understanding. I can imagine Jon returning that favour by inviting me into his kitchen in Vancouver (where Earl stayed once too) for the next chat. See how extremely poor this paragraph is without the visuals that come with all these links? Imagine. Combine this all with presence indicators for people, such as used in Plazes, or bluetooth data as in Imity, and RFID tags for physical objects… It would certainly blur the demarcation of on- and off-line.

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When I wrote about the dinner with Marc Canter here some 2 months ago I also mentioned thinking about social software as being composed of different triangles.

The notion stems from how I use Flickr and delicious. I track individuals and their bookmarks and through those two pieces of info I get to know their use of language as well as their general areas of interest for the day. But I also look at how the stuff I bookmark has been tagged by other people. Are these people already familiar to me? Different language use (in the tags) may hint towards different circles of people and communities.

You see that in both cases I don’t really look at the bookmark itself, and I certainly don’t use it as a singular piece of information. It is merely an object around which I look for existing relationships, and scout out possible new ones. An object of sociality that has served its role as soon as I used it to find new people, or connect to already familiar ones.

It works much the same way for Flickr, though the aspect to get a quick glance at what my existing relationships are up to is more important to me here.

In general you could say that both Flickr and delicious work in a triangle: person, picture/bookmark, and tag(s). Or more abstract a person, an object of sociality, and some descriptor. In every triangle there always needs to be a person and an object of sociality. The third point of the triangle is free to define as it were.

This becomes more interesting once you start using the descriptors to move from one object of sociality to the next, or when the descriptor is an object of sociality itself. Now you can hop through different applications while still doing the same thing you previously did inside one application: build connections to people based on their current interest, albeit a picture, a location, an event, a bookmark, a blogpost or a document.

We generally call the stacking of apps like this mash-up. But in this case more importantly it allows us as people to seamlessly wander from one application to another while not being interrupted because you have to consciously migrate from one ‘channel’ to another. It is not mash-up to bring more functionality into one new application based on existing ones, it is mash-up to more closely follow your own routines while building and maintaining relationships.

Plazes for instance puts itself in the place of the tags in Flickr, and presto, now pictures are tied to geographic locations and vice versa. Through which you then can find (new) people again.

To me this also means that self-proclaimed social applications that do not offer you the possibility to explore all sides of a triangle, aren’t useful as a social medium. A bookmarking service that does say how many others bookmarked the same thing, but does not let you explore who these people are or lets you see who uses what tags, only the tags used by themselves, doesn’t do much in a social sense. By maintaining the triangle you make sure that individuals keep their face in the masses even when you aggregate info. (You can always drill back to a person and her personal set of in this case bookmarks and tags)

You can enter any triangle through a single point. This is the most basic use of an application. I store pictures, I bookmark, I write, I geotag. But from that you can start exploring the sides of the triangle, finding new connections to people either based on the object of sociality, or by browsing the descriptors and hopping to the next object of sociality.

Social software I think is social because it puts relationships in the center view, and less the information that flows through these relationships. The possibility of triangulation allows you to also extend and broaden both existing and new relationships into new information domains, and thus increases the likelihood of new networks of relationships and meaning emerging from the background noise.

Photo Value of Triangulation by Roland Tanglao during the Seattle Blogwalk. (CC0 public domain)