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Remind HN: Your Flickr Favourites Are (Still) Public and Searchable

2 points by pessimism ↗ HN
A lot of you probably haven’t used Flickr in ages like I, and maybe Flickr or you have changed since then.

In late 2011[^1] (pre-Mayer), Yahoo! allowed users to search in the favourite collections of each other. Here is a basic query for mature content for your own profile to see what people might come across in your collection of favourites:

    http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=faves&q=sex+or+boobs+or+butt+or+porn [^2]
To search within another user’s favourites, retrieve their user ID from idGettr[^3], and paste it in a query like this:

    http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=faves-[[ ID ]]&q=sex+or+boobs+or+butt+or+porn [^4]
I didn’t know this, and I imagine it happened while I wasn’t using the service. Add to this that you cannot opt out of this.

I have been in touch with Yahoo![^5], and to summarize their response, public, searchable favourites with no opt-outs are here to stay. To each their own, and I am definitely a bit on the nutty side when it comes to privacy—I just can’t bring myself to ever have a Facebook account, but I totally understand people feel differently about these things. I’m sure other privacy fanatics on HN who check their privacy settings meticulously were as unaware of at least some this.

Some things have changed since the last time I and you used Flickr, and many of them are here to stay, so in the spirit of Steve Jobs’s choice words on privacy, at you at least now should have a good idea of what you’re signing up for.

6 comments

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resu
Correct me if I am wrong, but wasn't personal favourites made available to the public in two clicks instead of one in the 'old' design as well? And you could see all users that added a photo as a favourite when viewing the photo?

It just never occured to me that it was a feature that was not meant to be 'public'.

pessimism
I just thought of a way to check: archive.org.

It does indeed show that favourites were available from the user page: http://web.archive.org/web/20130501115607/http://www.flickr.....

As a result, I removed the paragraph from the OP. This is what it read, to anyone visiting just now:

    In addition, your favourites are now a single click 
    away for users in the redesign of your user profile. 
    It’s entirely possible this was the case before, though.
resu
Thanks for confirming. I haven't touched flickr for a while either, until this new redesign fanfare :)
josephlord
How does this behave when you have marked private photos as favourites (or those someone has shared with you and a small group)? I assume it doesn't show those pictures or even any metadata about them.
pessimism
I would consider it an outright bug, if that were the case, so I wouldn’t worry about that.

I haven’t added any photos to my favourites, so I can’t test it for you, alas.

@YahooCare are very quick to reach out, if you direct any questions at them, as shown in the last of my footnotes. It’s actually really weird, albeit a pleasant surprise, to see a big company respond and reach out to users in 2013. :)