Flickr API loop hole: Do I need to worry?

Okay, it's not a loop hole technically from Flickr side, but from a photographer's point of view, it's a breach of trust. Let me give you a background information on why such harsh words for such a nice website which I love so much.

Flickr exposes it's API (Application Programming Interface) which is quite simply a set of computer methods which allows a programmer to write applications that pull data from Flickr and show within it's own system.

One example would be a third party website that shows it's users photographs from a specific city. It does so by implementing Flickr API's to pull images from Flickr matching a specific city by filtering on city tag. Users get to see the thumbnails and full size images that link back to your photo stream so everyone is happy.

Quite harmless one might think, but things get dirty when the API implementation goes messy. Recently a mobile content provider implemented one of the API's to pull content from Flickr and allowed it's users to send those images directly to the mobile phones as wallpapers. The biggest mess up was that it did not validate any privacy settings done by the user - it searched public photographs and listed all of them irrespective of "All Rights Reserved".

The best part is that no photographers were even aware of this since no one asked them for their permission!! Some consider this theft and some consider it as breach of trust - debate still continues.....

Flickr does provide a method call to check what copyright attributes each photograph has and leaves the onus of filtering out those pictures from public display to the developer using the API. Not very cool I say.

For more details read this blog post: http://www.jmg-galleries.com/blog/2008/07/07/how-every-flickr-photo-ended-up-on-sale-this-weekend/

Technology is not in my control, and such things keep happening in the internet enabled world. I can take some measures to reduce the impact of such things. So here is what I did:

1) Make some of my pictures viewable by "Only Me or Friends & Family Only"
2) Updated all my contacts to either "Friends" or "Family"
3) Set download, blogging, printing, sharing picture options to "Only Me" (I know this can be bypassed by a smart Google user leveraging the static file loop hole, but my hope is that not many are interested in spending so much efforts in getting an image - and that is not something scrapers are after anyway)
4) Disabled viewing of large size pictures by anyone except me
5) Disabled access to my pictures via API's
6) Started considering getting my own domain and moving out of Flickr

I will loose some things in order to gain some control over who sees and shares my pictures:

1) I loose the ability to just give URL of my stream to people for seeing ALL the pictures. Only public images are visible.

2) My blog that you are reading will no longer have a widget to display my photos from Flickr on the home page

3) Less traffic since my photos will not be search-able very openly

Considering all my family and friends can still see the pictures, I am okay with loosing some advantages of Flickr.

At least, I can sleep in peace that my copy righted and in some cases private photos are not offered for sale and find way to someones mobile phone!!!

If you have any experience (good or bad) with internet photo scrapers, then do share your story with me.

Be careful next time you upload your pictures on internet. If it's public - it's available to anyone - no copyright notice can prevent a pervert thief from stealing your pictures. Flickr is a great site, but ensuring your own privacy is your job.

Have a great day!