Flickr has admitted it left some users’ private photos exposed for nearly three weeks, a big screw-up that would be a major scandal – if it happened at Facebook.
Some Flickr users have received e-mail from the company saying their private photos were accidentally made available to all comers. Affected accounts had their private photos exposed for 20 days, between Jan. 18 and Feb. 7. Private photos were not exposed to Flickr search or other search engines. In an apparently related glitch, some public photos were made private.
The outage, first reported by Marketing Land, was later confirmed by a Flickr VP and by the public relations department of parent company Yahoo, which has said only that a “very small” number of users were affected. (We tried and failed to obtain a more specific number from Yahoo.)
This is the kind of story that would seem likely to set off a social media firestorm if it occurred at a larger company like Apple or Facebook. But despite a nine-year history as an online photo pioneer, Flickr isn’t Facebook or Apple; it’s a scrappy underdog, counting its total photos in the single-digit billions, versus hundreds of billions on Facebook. As such, the story has been confined to a few tech-focused sites, including The Verge and Mashable.
So there are real advantages to Flickr’s relatively small size. After seeing its potential squandered year after year, the photo-sharing site is in the midst of a promising rebirth under Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, with a new mobile app that puts it in a great position to capitalize on people’s discomfort with Facebook and Facebook’s own privacy issues. Maybe some day soon, Flickr will be big enough that the world actually cares about its privacy blunders. Oddly enough, the only way for Flickr to get to that point is to prevent such blunders from recurring.
