Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

I had a good time hanging out last night at the Miss Aniela photowalk in San Francisco. We met a the Ferry Building at 6:30pm and about 40 or so of us spent a fair chunk of the time out shooting on Pier 14 at night in the dark. It was a great clear night in San Francisco with a great vantage spot to shoot the city. Afterwards we shot around Jutin Herman Plaza for a while and then headed over to Harrington’s for a little dinner and beer.

We weren’t actually able to make it inside the Ferry Building as I think a group that large sort of spooked the security guards there.

Thanks to everyone who came out. I enjoyed the company, photography and conversation. These shots are a few of mine from a small set of my images that I put together here. If you have photos from last night’s walk up online please tag them with photowalk020209. Thanks!

Last week I blogged about a Flickr user Shéhérazade who without warning saw her self moderated account get permanently deleted. The user was upset about this because they thought that they were abiding by all of the Flickr rules and posted a thread on this in the Flickr Help Forum which was promptly censored and shut down there. A lot of people felt that this was not right.

This week we have another Flickr user who was concerned that her account might not be set up right and so she wrote to Flickr staff asking if they could review her account and provide her input regarding if she had set her account up correctly or not.

Flickr’s response? Rather than respond back to the user and/or direct her on what she might need to do to have her account structured correctly at Flickr, simply without warning just pressed the big fat red delete button wiping out her entire account and all of her content permanently.

From the deleted account:

“I had an adult orientated stream of photos on flickr and was slowly building up a list of contacts, comments and views. All my pics were public and marked restricted except for 1 that contained no nudity and was marked moderate. My account was rated safe.

My email was nice enough. It contained the information in the first paragraph of this post and then went on to say that I did not want to get my account deleted for doing the wrong thing and that I would appreciate a review of my account to check I was all ok.”

The deleted user goes on to document her reply from Flickr:

“I got a response back within 12 hours

Regards,
-[edited out by staff]“

Now, Flickr tells people that they are allowed to host adult content as long as it is self moderated. Adult content, nudity, etc. is all over Flickr. The Flickr rules are that if you post that stuff you have to label it as “restricted,” this way people that don’t want to see it (and the default Flickr set up if people don’t bother to say one way or the other) won’t see it. It’s like it doesn’t exist to them.

So why when a Flickr user is playing by the rules and has self moderated all of their explicit photos “restricted,” do they summarily get their account deleted without warning simply for the crime of asking Flickr to review their account and tell them if they are doing everything ok?

Certainly Flickr owes its community more than this. It is the community after all that makes up Flickr. Flickr would be nothing without its community. And yet time and time again, over and over again, they seem to get away with deleting accounts and censoring content with no repercussion. Because Flickr seems to be the 800 pound gorilla and because today this is where the larger photo sharing community largely interacts, they seem to feel that they can just do whatever they feel like without any sort of consequence whatsoever.

And what’s sad, is maybe they’re right. Maybe they can just keep on censoring accounts and deleting accounts on a whim whenever they feel like it. Maybe they can continue destroying years of people’s work, thousands of comments, their uploaded images all without consequence because what are you going to do about it anyways?

But that still don’t make it right.

If you’d like to follow this case in the Flickr help forum you can do that here. Don’t be surprised though if the thread gets shut down shortly.

Update: Heather Champ has responded as follows in the Help Forum thread:

You’ve hit the nail on the head. I’ve circled round with the team here regarding our process and policies. “

As an aside there are currently 94 threads (most of them closed or locked by Flickr) in the Flickr help forum with the words “censorship” and “mistake” in them. And yet still Flickr doesn’t have a way to undo “accidental” account deletions.

Update, not unsurprising, but Flickr has now permanently closed this thread complaining about their censorship.

Update: Bonus Feature. What to do you do when Flickr deletes your paid Pro account not once but twice?

Many news outlets are running a story this morning that Olympic Great and winner of 16 medals last summer Michael Phelps apparently has admitted that a photo of him smoking pot is authentic.

From the BBC:

“Mr Phelps, 23, who won eight gold medals at the Beijing Olympics last year, was pictured by the News of the World inhaling from a glass pipe.

In a statement sent to the Associated Press news agency, the swimmer acknowledged the photo was authentic. “

To which I say, *who the hell cares!* Surely had this man been enjoying a martini instead of a bong nobody would have given a rats ass. And yet marijuana is no more harmful to your body than cigarettes and alcohol. The “war on drugs,” complete with the propaganda that Michael Phelps in this case somehow did something wrong is idiotic. At present we are spending way too much money prosecuting and incarcerating people for crimes associated with marijuana when smoking pot and getting high really is no different than downing a six pack or if you’re rich, a nice bottle of cabernet sauvignon.

The criminalization of marijuana has gone on too long. It has taken a huge toll on society enforcing it and ensuring that most of the money associated with the trade goes directly to organized crime and gangsters on the streets rather than a more sensible approach where it is sold through liquor stores and taxed like other arguably less than healthy things in our society (alcohol, tobacco gasoline, etc.).

It was the Great Depression and the need for tax revenues that finally got the United States to end the prohibition on alcohol. Maybe this most recent downturn and a need for tax revenue will finally convince people that marijuana ought to be legal as well. Those that argue against the legalization of marijuana most of the time have never even tried it. People make outlandish claims about how it zaps all your ambition and prevents you from achieving anything in life. But in actuality there are many people who use it regularly and are perfectly successful and do just fine with it. Just like there are people who alcohol ravages and people who can consume alcohol socially just fine.

Our President has admitted to smoking pot (and inhaling and enjoying it), millions of Americans smoke pot regularly every year, heck one of our popular TV shows now is basically all about pot, and now we have an Olympic hero who has imbibed. It’s time for the stigma associated with marijuana to go away. If people want to smoke pot there ain’t nothing wrong with that. Smoking pot won’t kill you. It’s time for the country to legalize it.

Rachel Gordon is out with an article over at the San Francisco Chronicle about a new 20 year contract signed by BART with some company called Wi-Fi Rail Inc. to offer wifi on the service. Rachel interviewed me for the article and I’m quoted in it about my thoughts about the service. I thought I’d take a second though to elaborate on BART’s new plan for wifi service.

1. $9 a day?!?!?! You’ve got to be f$%$^ing kidding me. That’s more than it already costs to ride BART a day. Similarly, $30 a month? Not thanks. I like my wifi as much as the next cat, but that’s just too expensive. I’m in a higher than average income range for BART riders and there’s no way in hell I’d pay that much money. Between paying to park at BART parking lots, increased BART ticket charges, and now super expensive wifi, it just won’t fly. Who does BART think they are in charging those high wifi connection rates? Holiday Inn or something. You expect to get fleeced when you pay for wifi at the hotel, but not on BART.

2. A 20 year contract seems like an incredibly stupid thing to commit to for any technology services period. Why not a 2 year or 5 year or if they must 7 year contract. Locking BART into a 20 year plan when technology is bound to improve in that time seems like a bad idea. Who’s negotiating these contracts anyways, government bureaucrats and politicians?

3. “BART riders in the future will be able take advantage of free Internet access – but with a catch. Access will be cut off after 3 1/2 minutes and the users will have to endure 30 seconds of ads before being able to surf the Internet.” Are you kidding me? At least in the beta program that I tested out on the system it took 3 1/2 minutes just to log on to their system (you had to relog on every time you used it — hello BART, there are these things called internet cookies, they’re yummy and can allow people not to have to resign on over and over and over again every single time). A lot of the time the system wouldn’t log on for me at all. Now, granted that was beta, but there is no way I’m going to go through a tedious sign on program and then 30 seconds of ads to surf the web for 3.5 minutes.

4. the 3G on my iPhone works in the above ground areas of BART as well as the underground areas near downtown. Tell me again why I’d pay that much money for just a wee bit faster connection.

5. Why am I going to pay $30 per month for BART wifi when most of the time I can’t even get a seat? Have you ever tried surfing the web with a laptop while standing up BART. Well… have you? Seats are next to impossible to get during commute hours unless you happen to start your commute out at the end of the Pittsburg Baypoint line in Antioch or wherever the hell it starts.

6. Why am I going to pay $30 per month for BART wifi when I’m already starting to take BART less because I can get a ride to and from work using casual carpool for free? BART’s getting more and more expensive which is driving people away from it. My iPhone works the entire trip while on casual carpool by the way.

7. “The company reported seamless service between the stations, even as the trains ran at high speeds,” says the article. Well, not if you count going from the Powell Street Station to the Embarcadero Station in my own experience using the service.

8. Why not try to at least in part work with one of the major telco providers here? I get free wifi at Starbucks because I use AT&T. Let the carriers subsidize some of the cost by letting their users have free or reduced fee service on the system. Didn’t Google want to put free wifi in all of San Francisco before our idiot SF politicians chased them away? Did anybody talk to Google before hatching this plan?

9. It sounds like, at least initially, the service will only serve downtown SF, the tube and downtown Oakland. These are the shorter commutes and the people less likely to pay up. The people more likely to pay are the ones with the longer commutes who are more likely to both get a seat and have longer time on the train to enjoy that free wifi service.

and finally…..

10. What good is free wifi on the BART system if the BART cops are just going to shoot you anyways. (ok, that was a really cheap shot and has nothing to do with this wifi service but I couldn’t think of another good reason why I don’t like the service and a 9 reason list isn’t nearly as cool as a 10 reason list.)

To check out my photos of BART click through here.