What does your photo hosting service say about you?
Did you really need another reason to not use flickr?
Here it is:
flickr Pro Account Deleted Over Political Comments.
I’ve no idea what the guy said. I don’t care. Because even if he was in the wrong, this is unjustified.
Here’s the thing: accounts are insecure. Sometimes they get hacked. People re-use passwords sometimes. Point one: data used in account resets can be gained easily through basic social mining. Point two: Yahoo forces everyone to sign in under the same username and password. Like what Google eventually got around to doing. One login. Great. So many more places my username can be seen and potentially hacked.
So whatever, flickr. What a shame your staff feels justified to play nanny state and delete someone’s irretrievable photos, judge and jury. No notification, nothing.
There are a lot of other services where you can back up your photos for free. Where you are even allowed to post political comments. Free speech, and whatnot.
And if you use another service you won’t have to worry about looking like a small-minded idiot by association.
June 27th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
What makes sense to me is: Data storage should be separated from participation in a community.
In other words, your data should be safe, but you should be taken out of public view/search/etc. until you exhibit whatever “community standards” behavior is required for legal operation of a site.
Making these two the same (deleting photos for someone whose offense is being rude in a community) is just punitive and will make users find other solutions as they become available.