Flikr weirdos

April 5, 2008 8:48 AM

I'm a Flikr newbie. We just returned from holiday and I posted our snaps on the site. Yesterday my wife calls me at work creeped out that someone has favourited a picture of one of our daughters in a market in Vietnam. She's seven. All the users other favourited and personal pics are likewise of young girls.

I'm of two minds and need some advice and clear headed thinking. One one hand, big deal, the world is full of images of young girls, if that's your thing the Sears Back To School catalogue must be like Christmas and your birthday all rolled into one. What harm can come of it. And I'd far rather have someone grabbing pics of my kids off my Flikr account than via a telephoto lens in the schoolyard. On the other hand...ewwwww. Creep factor ten.

Should I be concerned? Should I lock up the pics? It kinda goes against my desire to make them accessible, and I realize that there are billions of pics of kids and one is pretty much no different from another.

What to do?

posted by Keith Talent to society & culture (25 comments total)

Another Flickr member is making me uncomfortable. What can I do?

You can block them.

People you block can't interact with you or your photos. In practice this means they:

* Can't comment on your photos. All comments on your photos that they make are deleted.
* Are removed as your contact, and you are removed as theirs. They can't add you as a contact again.
* Can't add your photos as favorites. Any of your photos marked as their favorites are removed.
* Can't blog your photos
* Can't add notes or tags. Any notes and tags they added to your photos are removed.
* Can't send you FlickrMail

There are three ways to block a person:

1. Click the "Block [membername]" link on the person menu
2. Click the "Block this person?" link on their profile page
3. Delete a comment on one of your photos. (You'll see the option to block them, too.)

To see the people you've block on your block list, click the link at the bottom of your Contact List.

People you choose to block are not notified that you've blocked them.

You can release the blocked person anytime. Go to your "Contact List" under "Contacts" in the main menu. Removing the block does not restore anything that was deleted when you blocked them.

posted by beaucoupkevin at 8:54 AM on April 5 [1 favorite]

Also, for me, any picture of a kid on flickr is on that I set to "only friends and family." It makes sense to me anyhow because those are the ones who are going to be interested in my niece and nephew.

Blocking the person seems to be a good idea too.
posted by ugf at 9:09 AM on April 5 [2 favorites]

Blocking the person seems to me to address the perception of the problem, rather than the problem itself. The only difference between this person and a dozen others is that they were crazy enough to favorite the picture.

If you are uncomfortable about this, I would do what ugf (and I) do and make all family pictures private.
posted by selfnoise at 9:17 AM on April 5

When I post private photos on Flickr and want to share them with others who either do not want to take the time to join, or are not savvy enough to follow through with the process, I use a Flickr guest pass.
posted by tomorama at 9:19 AM on April 5

Did you tag the photo with anything that might let people find the photo? I got weirded out 'cause a photo I took at a county fair of a teenage woman in a pink cast has more views—by a couple orders of magnitude—than any of my other photos. Once I took "cast" out of the tags the views dropped precipitously (after figuring out from my Flickr stats that the people were probably cast fetishists). Of course people can still find your stuff through random methods, and I imagine lots of folks who look for stuff in creepy just reload the "Everyone's Photos" page ... creepily.

Setting sketchy photos to Friends + Family is a good method. If you want to send out specific sets to people who don't have Flickr accounts (and so are neither Friend nor Family, according to Flickr), you can send out a guest pass. It works pretty well.
posted by wemayfreeze at 9:24 AM on April 5 [1 favorite]

Also: yes, blocking the person won't really help. In my experience of The Creepy, there are too many people out there with willies-giving potential to even begin to block them all.
posted by wemayfreeze at 9:26 AM on April 5

The picture wasn't tagged except for the whole batch was tagged Vietnam. I've blocked the user, his photostream is exclusively young girls. Although I'm creeped, I recognize freaking out helps nothing, just because Flikr gives you the ability to track weird behavior, the same things have been going on untraceably in the offline world forever.
posted by Keith Talent at 9:38 AM on April 5 [1 favorite]

Additionally (to what's been suggested) you can post a note to flickr at large in any of several forums, example.
posted by dawson at 9:41 AM on April 5

As a personal rule, any pictures I put on flickr where the main subject is under 16, I lock down to friends and family only. Because if you block a person but don't lock the picture, all they have to do is sign out to see it again, but if you make it semi-private, then they specifically have to be on your friends/family list to see it at all. :)
posted by Zarya at 10:50 AM on April 5 [1 favorite]

all they have to do is sign out to see it again

Whoa, I left out a part there. It was supposed to be "all they have to do is sign out and create a new account to see it again". Sorry.
posted by Zarya at 10:52 AM on April 5

FWIW, this happens to my wife's pics semi-regularly (she's an avid flickr-er) - block the user and set the picture privacy to friends/family only.
posted by gnutron at 10:54 AM on April 5

So now that you know some options, you also might consider a quick email to the other Flickr members whose photos have been favorited by this potential perv, alerting them to the situation and linking them to the blocking info that beaucoupkevin linked to. It's great that your wife noticed the tag, and not everyone would, or knows to be concerned about it enough to look at a forum. And my sympathies, it's a drag to have to worry about stuff.
posted by tula at 10:55 AM on April 5

Nthing block that user and set the privacy for that pic to contacts only.

The thing that's good about blocking that user is that other creeps with similar tastes who maybe know that this guy has a big collection of faves will no longer be able to find your photos. I think they're all networked or something.
posted by Beckminster at 11:00 AM on April 5

So now that you know some options, you also might consider a quick email to the other Flickr members whose photos have been favorited by this potential perv, alerting them to the situation and linking them to the blocking info that beaucoupkevin linked to.

I'm not sure any of that is fruitful or will do any good. The whole notion of "blocking" at flickr came about because people wanted someway to not have to interact with these people. So now you don't have to...with flickr tools. That is, they can still view your photos, or bookmark them in their browser or whatever.

One solution that actually works is to make your photos friends and family only. Then you can choose who can see everything. Unfortunately, once its public, it not just public at flikr, its public on the big, wide internet.
posted by vacapinta at 11:18 AM on April 5 [1 favorite]

...once its public, it not just public at flikr, its public on the big, wide internet.

This bears repeating. Flickr photos get picked up all over the place unless you lock them down with friends/family privacy. I've had my pictures show up all kinds of places online without me doing anything to promote them (admittedly, my pics are under a CC share alike license). With pictures of kids, it's definitely worth considering putting them up online at all. I hardly ever post pictures of my nephew or of friends' kids, for this one reason alone. And if I do, I only post ones where they are covered head to toe.

A sad reflection of the underbelly of modern culture, really...
posted by gemmy at 11:55 AM on April 5

I'm not sure any of that is fruitful or will do any good...because people wanted someway to not have to interact with these people.

I think vacapinta might've misunderstood me, I was not suggesting you email the possible perv. To be clearer:
1) Like beaucoupkevin etc. said, Block the possible perv, and follow other Flickr instructions on blocking. Which you've already done.
2) Like ugf etc. said, switch all children's or any other sensitive pics to friends and family only.
3) Like dawson said, post something on a Flickr message board about possible perv account.
4) Consider using Flickr internal email to notify the other accounts that have had kid photos favorited by the possible perv in case they haven't noticed the problem or aren't savvy about how to do steps 1&2 themselves. As a kindness to them.
posted by tula at 1:03 PM on April 5

I was puzzled for a while by the apparently inexplicable popularity of this picture on my Flickr stream. The only picture I had that had more views was a photo of my desk from the desk thread here on Metafilter. So I got to digging around and signed up for the stats thing, and found out it had been linked from here. [NSFW] Rule 34, indeed!
posted by pjern at 1:10 PM on April 5

Zarya wrote: if you block a person but don't lock the picture, all they have to do is sign out to see it again

...and then wrote: Whoa, I left out a part there. It was supposed to be "all they have to do is sign out and create a new account to see it again". Sorry

No, if it's a public photo, anyone can view it, even if they don't have a Flickr account.
posted by Jaltcoh at 4:34 PM on April 5

The Flickr staff monitoring the help forum threads will delete any user name you might post there.

You said the photostream of the person who favorited your picture was exclusively of young girls. Could you tell if they were photos that person took? If not, that person has violated Flickr's terms of service (they take a dim view of people posting works that are not their own). You could always report abuse on those pictures or otherwise alert Flickr and they will terminate the account.
posted by plastic_animals at 5:26 PM on April 5

I'm inclined to think that it's not worth worrying about. Your pic is just another in their stream of similar. That said, I tend to lock my own photos containing people to friends/family-only - I just don't see much point or have any use for having stuff public.

But if the purpose of your account is so friends and relatives without flickr accounts can see the family, then I don't think it's worth locking it down - even if you give them a password and username, the usefulness to them just won't be the same. OTOH, if it's bothering your wife, well I think she's over-reacting, but that doesn't change the fact that she's bothered by it and that must be changed, in which case consider locking it all down.

Have you considered getting your own domain and website? That way it can be open to all the friends and family, but with no sites linking to it and it not on google else, the only people who go there will be people you've told about it. Make a card with the url to give to Grandma.
posted by -harlequin- at 9:11 PM on April 5

This is pretty simple. As you said, there's not actual harm here. Maybe he's a perv, maybe he's not. If you simply don't want to be creeped out, make them private.

However, this:

4) Consider using Flickr internal email to notify the other accounts that have had kid photos favorited by the possible perv in case they haven't noticed the problem or aren't savvy about how to do steps 1&2 themselves. As a kindness to them.
posted by tula

Is a ridiculous witch hunt. People like this scare me more than anyone simply marking a picture a favorite, no matter their motive.
posted by Dennis Murphy at 9:18 PM on April 5

Yes - what Dennis Murphy, a world with fewer witch hunts and more flickr-favourited photos is a better world than one with more witch hunts and fewer flickr-favourited photos.
posted by -harlequin- at 12:56 AM on April 6

That was supposed to be "what Dennis Murphy said".
posted by -harlequin- at 12:57 AM on April 6

I once heard someone that worked at an online photo site talk about the weirdness these fetishists have for printing. Because the people behind the scenes can not only know what people favorite, but also what people order for prints, he was saying that there were a few times where they noticed someone that favorited 1000s of pictures of casts, or panythose, or (ick, yeah) kids would order huge posters of some stranger's innocuous photo of their child.

They felt bad about filling the orders, knowing it's obviously some freak with a thing about one of the photos, and they could check the database to see the person ordering the photo had no relationship with the person that posted it. Worse yet, as a person that posts photos, you have no idea what people order prints of. The photo site couldn't figure out a law being broken and I think they fulfill the orders for prints, but I know they are weirded out by it.
posted by mathowie at 8:38 AM on April 6

I don't think it would be a kindness to alert other photo posters that a pervert was viewing them. Better to remain blissfully ignorant, I would think.
Importantly, as the OP suggests, this sort of thing has been going on forever offline, so giving somebody the heads up they need to get freaked out isn't really adding to the world's happiness.
posted by bystander at 12:01 AM on April 7