Some users of the popular photo sharing service aren’t big fans of Flickr’s new owner, Yahoo, and a forthcoming terms of service change. Wired Magazine notes the emergence of a small group of Flickr users who do not want to become Yahoo users, despite the fact Yahoo purchased Flickr earlier this year.
Do Flickr Users Want Yahoo?
Per the FAQ at Flickr’s site:
“We will be migrating all independent Flickr accounts to Yahoo’s network in 2006. At that time, if you have not done so already, you will be asked to create a Yahoo ID (or link your account to your Yahoo ID if you already have one) in order to continue using your account.”
A few hundred users have signed up at Flick Off, where they propose removing their content before the mandatory switch takes place. But what that will accomplish isn’t clear.
Yahoo has several million members, and makes the vast majority of services available to them at no cost. Advertiser revenue subsidizes the freely available services instead of user fees. Users made Flickr popular and compelling enough to draw Yahoo’s attention and checkbook. Four or five hundred users removing content just won’t be noticed in Sunnyvale.
Despite the protestations, the Flickr/Yahoo ID requirement isn’t nearly as egregious as Yahoo’s claim of copyright upon all GeoCities properties, an action Wired reminds readers of in its article. Yahoo announced it had the freedom to do whatever it wanted with user material on GeoCities’ sites, but quickly changed its stance at that time.
A current thread on the Flick Off site demonstrates the strength of feeling some users have for the changeover. One user with the ID of James Sharpe posts: “I don’t want to join with Yahoo, if I’d have known this was going to happen I would have never joined Flickr in the first place.”
The Yahoo ID requirements haven’t been hidden away from Flickr users. The problem may not even be Yahoo itself, but the act of forking over personal information to a big publicly traded company. Yahoo states its intent to collect personally information on the bottom of the Flickr signup page, along with a link to how the company may use that information:
When you register we ask for information such as your name, email address, birth date, gender, zip code, occupation, industry, and personal interests. For some financial products and services we may also ask for your address, Social Security number, and information about your assets. Once you register with Yahoo! and sign in to our services, you are not anonymous to us.
Yahoo tries to address concerns about misuse of personal information, again from their privacy site:
We provide the information to trusted partners who work on behalf of or with Yahoo! under confidentiality agreements. These companies may use your personal information to help Yahoo! communicate with you about offers from Yahoo! and our marketing partners. However, these companies do not have any independent right to share this information.
Just because a partner doesn’t have the right to knowingly share doesn’t mean the information won’t be shared. Visa and MasterCard had similar agreements in place with CardSystems, which ended up being worthless after 40 million credit cards were exposed to criminal attackers. And CardSystems’ failure to delete post-transaction data would not even have come to light without this breach taking place.
Flickr users don’t mind sharing their photographic creations with the world. The protesting users probably don’t want to share beyond what they willingly place on the Internet. But big companies are always going to buy up smaller companies when the purchase adds value to a business. The next Flickr may be bought by Microsoft, or even Ask. They’re going to require more user registration when they do.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
