So… I have to lock down all of my flickr photos. There are too many pervs on the internet.
Flickr allows you to track statistics on photos viewed, and I periodically check in to see what people are looking at. I’ve noticed recently that pictures of the kids in bathing suits have become popular.
At first, I didn’t think much of it; I just figured people were catching up on old photos. But then I started noticing weird patterns. One or two photos would get viewed from a set that’s months old… “Hmm. That’s weird… well, maybe it turned up in a search result.” As I noticed that it was almost always pictures of people in bathing suits, I began to worry.
The more I considered the possibility that a perv was to blame, the more obvious it became… I googled “flickr perverts” and discovered horror stories from many people. Their accounts typically describe the realization coming after they got a “favorite” request from a stranger, follow the link to the stranger’s profile, then discover that all of his favorites are young girls. Terrifying stuff…
I hate that it’s come to this. I really like being open with my life and with my photos.
So here’s my compromise – I’m going to upload all of the photos as private, then immediately post a guest pass to the gallery on this blog. This reduces the attack surface – these people are looking on flickr or searching google; they’re not scouring blogs – yet.
We’ll see how this goes. Additionally, I’m going to be scaling back which metadata I export with the photos. Luckily, Adobe Lightroom allows you to specify that in your database, you want the tag to display “Tim Bellomo,” but on export, you just want it to show “Tim.” Cool stuff.
What do you all think? Is there even anybody there?
UPDATE: Flickr adjusted their guest pass feature to allow a Guest Pass for the entire photostream. This makes it so I can still just give friends and family just one link and they’ll always be able to have the latest and greatest. Is this better/worse/same from a privacy perspective?
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