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• 12/14/2007 - ArtistServer News and a new site: FreeMusicLicensing.com
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• 07/31/2007 - Add Links to Profiles on MySpace, Facebook, and More
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What does "privacy" mean to you? I'm sure you have some form of a definition, and chances are, it's fairly close to mine. And what about privacy settings on Websites, do you know what a site means when they say that your information or content is private? Do you simply look at the options "public" or "private" and accept that these words are defined the way you would define them?

Unfortunately, you do have to ask what private means, because you never know the extent of the privacy, what the privacy actually covers or doesn't cover, and as I found today, that's not even enough. Sometimes you need to test their systems to find the truth.

I recently started the photo gallery tools for ArtistServer.com - which will allow members to host and share photos in a similar manner as Flickr.com. When it came time to plan my method for storing the images, I thought it would be a good idea to look over Flickr.com's URLs for the images they host. I have a free account there and 1 image posted that's set to private. So I hit the site with Firefox, and start viewing the URLs, then figure it would be a good idea to check how they were hanlding access control to the actual photos. By Access control, I'm referring to the ability members have to set how the photo is accessible. You can provide the image to the public, to private + Friends, private + Familiy, and private + Firends and Family. After a few tests in two browsers, I realized the settings had nothing to do with the photo - they only dealt with how the photo was treated "ON" Flickr.com.

Let's summarize that down to something you can easily quote:

Public and private settings on Flickr.com have nothing to do with the actual photos, only the way the photo is displayed on the site. Any photo with any setting can be viewed if the address (URL) is known.

Ok - so you might ask, "How would people know the URL?" That's an understandable question to have, and we could go over various scenarios... like a mom who published photos of her child who found the images were being linked to by the kind of people you wouldn't let near your kids. Fortunately, she deleted the images off of Flickr - if she changed the access to Private - they would still have had access. This is an actual scenario I read about in the Flickr forums today. I'm sure there are other situations - but the point is, Flickr.com is using the terms "Private" and "Public" - yet the actual execution reveals these terms should be: "Not Viewable on Flickr.com" and "Viewable on Flickr.com."

My next step in my investigation, was to verify what I was experiencing - so, I hit their FAQs. The following is a link to the FAQ which attempts to answer my questions:

The FAQ Item on Flickr.com:
http://flickr.com/help/privacy/#32

FAQ: What if I don't want everyone to see my photos?

The way it should be answered:

We can only offer a certain degree of protection which only controls the display of your photos on the actual Flickr.com site. No matter the setting you've selected, if the URL to the photo is known, it can be viewed. If you change a photo from public to private, the image URL will still be viewable to the public.

Every photo comes with its own privacy settings. You can make a photo available to everyone (That's public, and includes people visiting the site who aren't Flickr members), only make it visible to people who are your friends, just to your family, to both your friends and family, or you can select to not share or display your photo on Flickr.

The way it is answered at Flickr.com:

That's not a problem. Every photo comes with its own privacy settings. You can make a photo available to everyone (That's public, and includes people visiting the site who aren't Flickr members), only make it visible to people who are your friends, just to your family, to both your friends and family, or you can keep an image completely private.

If you would like some additional verification about this situation, you can check this thread in their forums - it's the only place where they have the truth about their understanding of Private and Public.

http://flickr.com/forums/bugs/6066/93410/

I do have to say that I agree with Eric, the Flickr staff member who responded in the thread I linked to above. It would be very difficult for them to serve each image after hitting their database. I have to do this for ArtistServer.com when serving mp3s, and it's a bottleneck once the site is getting a lot of hits. I to will serve photos as direct links on ArtistServer, but I don't plan to redefine "Public" and "Private," I plan to use an honest definition like the corrected FAQ answer above.

And Flickr, please, change the text on your site, stop giving people a false sense of security, and don't misuse the terms "Public" and "Private," they're very important to us.