Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

Got this email today from Varese Layzer. Haven’t had a chance to look into everything yet, but this sounds like it sucks. Makes me think I should avoid buying coffee at Ritual Coffee Roasters in the future. I’ve emailed Eileen from Ritual Coffee Roasters for a response and will publish it here if I get one.

“Hi, Tom

I’m sorry I didn’t know you until one of my colleagues forwarded to me your name and that you might be interested in my story. I hope you might take a second to read about my case?

A very prominent San Francisco cafe, Ritual Coffee (ritualroasters.com), offered to show my work. I asked them to choose from among my many photographs and they said I could do what I liked as long as it was not portraits. I invited them to view the work I chose. I also asked if I could put up an artist statement. They said yes. I said it would be large and was that okay — they said yes.

I spent approximately $3,000 on the show and hundreds of hours (as you can well imagine). It was professionally framed.

The owner of the cafe tore down the statement a few days after it opened without telling me, two days ago. When I noticed this, I complained bitterly to the curator, who had been my only point person and had done all the approving, etc. He apologized and left a message with the owner. The owner, Eileen Hassi, wrote today to tell me to take the entire show down now. You can see her letter here.

In it, she says the show was too serious for a cafe and that she had goofed by not telling me this sooner. She fired the curator (who told me he was actually a volunteer) and he has renounced all responsibility for the incident. She has offered me “$300 for your time on this one.” She will not phone me or give me her phone number and has further contacted me only to say that I must take it down by Thursday.

You can see the work — pictures of furniture, believe it or not — here, and the inflammatory statement here.

I would be happy to show the work without the statement. Most people who have seen the work without the statement have found it totally harmless (which is why I added the statement, frankly!). While I’m sort of happy that the statement is such a Rite-of-Spring-riot inducer to one woman, I think she’s making a terrible mistake and that the work itself is really very pleasant if you don’t show it with the statement.

I hope this is something that interests you and your readers. I’m not sure what to do.

Thanks for reading,

Varese”

Update 3-8-2012: Just got this email from Varese:

Making Room will be shown at Krowswork Gallery, 480 23rd St., Oakland, krowswork.com, from March 30th to April 28th, along with two other artists’ work. (I also have another “serious” series in this show.) The opening is the evening of the 30th. You are most welcome — it would be great to meet you.”

TechCrunch is reporting that Flickr has cited “Community Guidelines” for censoring an Egyptian blogger’s uploaded photos of Egyptian Secret Police. The photos in question were originally uploaded by Hossam Hamalawy, aka Arabawy to his Flickr account here.

According to Arabawy these photos were taken from State Security Police headquarters in Nasr City which he says “hosted one of Mubarak’s largest torture facilities.” Attention was raised over this deletion yesterday after NPR’s Andy Carvin tweeted out concerns about the removal.

According to Techcrunch, Flickr issued the following statement to them regarding the content removal:

“The images in question were removed because they were not that member’s work. As stated by the Community Guidelines, ‘Flickr accounts are intended for members to share original photos and video that they themselves have created.’

While we regret that this action has upset the user, he must understand that this is not a decision we ever take lightly but only as necessary to ensure that Flickr remains a great place to creatively post and share original photos and videos with friends, family and the world.”

Personally I think that this is one giant cop out on Flickr’s part. Flickr knows that Flickr is *full* of photos that are “not a member’s work.” In fact Flickr staff themselves routinely upload photos to their own personal photostreams that are “not their work.” For example, is this Flickr Maps screenshot of a Rev Dan Catt photograph really Flickr Chief Matthew Rothenberg’s own work? What about this screengrab of an AOL advertisement? Is this Rothenberg’s “own work?” How about this screengrab of a Valleywag page? While I suspect that this “flickrhq masturbating dinosaur award for excellence in the field of community abuse and advocacy,” is in fact Rothenberg’s own photograph, his own stream, as well as the streams of many other flickr staffers are full of photos that are not “their work.”

Withdrawing Arabawy’s photos of suspected torturers by citing a technicality that the photos were not “his own work,” is disingenuous. The photos were pulled because Flickr was pressured to pull the photos and chose to respond to that pressure rather than to take a stand for freedom. Flickr knows that Flickr is chock full of photographs in photostreams that are not a members own work and this act on their part simply points to another act where they have selectively applied one of their rules to suit their needs using their overly ambiguous Community Guidelines as justification. Flickr should apologize to Arabawy and restore his photoset.

Certainly there might be times that Flickr ought to consider enforcing a policy of a user “not uploading their own work.” Blatant copyright infringement. An account by someone simply hosting eBay graphics. Etc. But using this technicality to remove politically sensitive and important public domain images from a Flickr user’s photostream is not one of them.

Update: While looking closer at the photo “flickrhq masturbating dinosaur award for excellence in the field of community abuse and advocacy” in Rothenberg’s stream, it looks like it actually also isn’t “his own work” either. At least according his tags, the photo was taken by Heather Champ. I suppose when you’re the boss of flickr you can get away with this sort of blatant community guidelines violation. If you’re a journalist exposing torturers from a corrupt government on the other hand, well, not so much.

Update #2: on Slashdot here.

Update #3: It looks like the photos that were taken down off of Flickr have been republished. Anonymous Operations posted a new link to the photos and tweeted that they are a “gift to the Egyptian people.”

Best Viewed Large

There are over 12,000 threads that come up in the Flickr Help Forum for the search term “deleted” What is wrong with this picture?

Flickr users deserve due process before our accounts are deleted without warning.

The lack of attention being paid to Flickr, whose customer service reps appear to lack technical expertise as well as graciousness, seems like another example of Yahoo neglecting a service it bought despite that service having a large, loyal userbase. After news leaked that Yahoo planned to sunset or get rid of the social bookmarking service Delicious, fear spread that Yahoo would nix Flickr next.

Yahoo’s ultimate response to the recent Flickr drama is a good sign for fans of the service. While it was about a day late, Yahoo/Flickr did the necessary things: apologized, fixed the problem, arguably overcompensated Mr. Wilhelm, and are working on a solution to prevent the same mistake in the future. But we appreciate the reminder that the internet is not written in ink.

http://www.observer.com/2011/tech/flickr-deleting-user-accounts

The Flickr Censorship Division must be working overtime this week. The latest comes to us courtesy of The Brothers Brick, a blog devoted to, well, of all things, LEGO.

Apparently they had a successful little group on Flickr devoted to all things LEGO. According to the group’s creator and adminstrator he went on to his Flickr group Jan 29th only to find that it had been deleted by Flickr. He’s not sure why, but best he can tell Flickr deleted it because someone had posted a thread in the “leaks” thread about LEGO products. Rather than contact him and try to resolve whatever issue there may have been with LEGOs they just simply nuked their entire group. No warning, no explanation, just KAAABOOOOOM!!!!!! Sayonara LEGO boy.

From “The Brothers Brick”:

As the creator and an administrator of the group I was first in line to hear about it if something had gone wrong. I’d heard nothing. Over the following six days I’ve pieced together what happened. In LEGO 16+ we had a thread for leaks. All discussion in the group was only available to members of the list and one of those members had reported this thread to TLG. They had taken their usual action (lawyerly email) to flickr and Yahoo! (who are directly responsible for these issues) had decided to simply delete the entire group. Not the thread, not the links but the entire group.

I wonder if adults playing with LEGOs might have somehow violated the Flickr don’t be “that guy, you know, that guy” rule, that don’t be creepy rule?

Check out my lego set on Flickr here. Please flickr don’t delete me for having a LEGO set.

An interesting comment over at the NY Observer’s story on yesterday’s “accidental” account deletion of Micro Wilhelm from Flickr user Jolengs.

Jolengs claims in the comments: “i just lost my 3200 plus photos today when i tried logging in it says – this member is no longer active…boo to yahoo, it should have been my 6th year this feb.22! ;(“

A quick look at the Jolengs account on Flickr shows that indeed it would appear to be deleted. You can see the Google cache of his page prior to yesterday here. The cache of his profile page shows that he had indeed been a long-term member of the site since 2005.

If I were Blake Irving or Carol Bartz or Matthew Rothenberg I’d probably instruct Flickr staff to stop deleting any more accounts until they can get their house in order in terms of undo delete functionality. Seriously, this situation is going from bad to worse and the story has hit the mainstream press now in a big way appearing in stories at the Los Angeles Times, TechCrunch, The Telegraph, etc.

Maybe Flickr should have actually listened to the community almost a year and a half ago when we were clamoring for this sort of functionality rather than just locking the thread of those of us who were complaining.

Another interesting update on Micro Wilhelm’s case. An anonymous commenter who claims to be a “Yahoo employee” left a comment on my other post on this story saying that Yahoo is actually working on restoring Wilhelm’s account and will have it back up in the next few days.

“Iam an yahoo employee and right now we have a backup of the data that we are restoring the photos from. The user should have all the photos back in the next day or so.”

No word if that means just that his photos are back or if all of his faves/comments/tags/etc. will also be there. But I suspect that the comment is legit as the IP address that generated it came from Yahoo Inc. in Santa Clara.

Update #1: PC World is now reporting that Flickr has increased his compensation to 25 years of Pro account, up from 4.

Yahoo statement from PC World: “Yesterday, Flickr mistakenly deleted a member’s account due to human error. Flickr takes user trust very seriously and we, like our users, take great pride in being able to take, post and share photos. Our teams are in touch with the member and are currently working hard to try to restore the contents of his account. In addition, we are providing the member with 25 years of free Flickr Pro membership. We are also actively working on a process that will allow us to easily restore deleted accounts and will roll this functionality out soon.”

Update #2: It looks like Flickr has restored Wilhelm’s account now.

In a blog post entitled “You have to be f****ing kidding Yahoo” Flickr user Mirco Wilhelm is claiming that Flickr “accidentally” deleted his own account when he reported another user for copyright violation. From Wilhelm:

Today I was a bit surprised when trying to log into my Flickr account. It didn’t remember I was logged in, but asked me for my password, knowing who I am. Then I was asked to “create” a Flickr account.

Well, it turned out, they actually had.

Wilhelm goes on to state that he actually got an apology note back from Flickr staff for nuking the wrong account.

Hello,

Flickr staff

Unfortunately f you look at Wilhelm’s Flickr account, all of the photos in fact now do appear to be deleted. You can see the Google cache copy of what Wilhelm’s account used to look like (including over 3,400 photos) here for the time being.

If Wilhelm’s claims are true, this is yet another troubling example of bad account deletions at Flickr. It’s terrible to think that as a user I could put thousands of hours into my Flickrstream and have it all disappear one day because a flickr staffer did an oppsie. Not backing up our data upon deletion is irresponsible on Yahoo’s part. It would be very easy for Yahoo to simply code accounts as private for one week prior to permanent deletion in order to avoid these sorts of unfortunate mistakes. Giving someone 4 years of free Flickr Pro does not make up for the destruction of over 3,400 photos and it’s irresponsible for Yahoo to continue operating Flickr in this manner.

I wonder if the Flickr staffer who nuked Mirco’s account had any of those Blake Irving Flickr margaritas prior to pressing the nuke button and if so how many?

Thanks for the heads up Nils!

Update: Wilhelm confirms his account deletion in the comments and adds, “there where close to 4000 photos in there at total, not all of them public, but still it will be a lot of work to rebuild all the web content that used these picture (like my own blogs).”

Update #2: NY Observer picks up the story here.

Update #3: On digg here and here. If you think that Flickr needs to build in a way to restore our accounts over bad deletions vote up there.

Update #4: Flickr Staffer Zack Sheppard says a new feature is coming to Flickr to enable them to restore deleted accounts. It’s about f***ing time. Hopefully they also implement a sane policy of allowing users to take self corrective action regarding Flickr problems with accounts in the future in lieu of permanent deletion.

Flickr also has reached out with similar statements to both the L.A. Times and NY Observer.

Update #5: The story is also now on TechCrunch here and PetaPixel here.

It’s worth noting that a strong push was made for an undo delete function back in August of 2009. At that point though Flickr just locked the thread where people were complaining and dismissed it saying that they were not working on such a feature. Why does it take a major Yahoo/Flickr PR Blunder to get them to finally give a damn?

Update #6: An anonymous commenter claiming to work for Yahoo left the following comment in the comments section of this post. “Iam an yahoo employee and right now we have a backup of the data that we are restoring the photos from. The user should have all the photos back in the next day or so.”

The IP address that they commented from reconciles as coming from headquarters at Yahoo Inc.

A few weeks ago I blogged about using Quora for photographers. I’ve been on the site pretty much daily since then and have enjoyed both participating and contributing to the service. I mostly spend time in the photography and Flickr subjects and have found lots of interesting questions and answers. I’ve answered a few questions and asked a few more myself.

But after reading this article by my friend Robert Scoble, I’m beginning to reconsider whether or not investing time in Quora makes sense. Best that I can tell Quora seems to be enabling anonymous “editors” with special powers to sanitize the site as they see fit.

From Scoble: “Turns out the question could have been collapsed by a reviewer (who isn’t paid by Quora, but given “special powers”). To fix this problem the reviewer’s name should be included on the collapsed answer, along with the reason why it was collapsed. There also should be a way to contest/appeal the downvote. Either way, whenever a question gets collapsed it should be very clear why, who did it, and what process the answerer can go through to change the answer to respond to the criticism, and get it upvoted again.”

So I guess Quora is giving some users special anonymous powers to edit the site as they see fit.

Those of you that know me know that I hate censorship. But even worse than censorship is anonymous censorship. In Scoble’s case apparently he had some very popular answers on the site that were collapsed (hidden) without any sort of explanation or accountability or anything.

I remember one of my first experiences with wikipedia. I had just come back from seeing the most amazing massive ladybug swarm. There were thousands of them, all over a tree. They turned the tree red there were so many of them. Apparently this is something that ladybugs do. I wanted to learn more about ladybugs so when I went home I looked up the ladybug entry on wikipedia. It was a good entry but the photos sucked. It had a really lame couple of bad photos of ladybugs — so I posted some of my ladybug swarming photos to the entry. They were much better photos. A couple of days later I got an email from a wikipedia editor telling me that she’d removed my photos because wikipedia wasn’t a place for my “self promotion.”

Ironically, the photo in question (above) is good enough for Getty to sell as a stock photograph, but not good enough to give away to wikipedia for free.

“Whatever,” I told myself, if they want crappier photos of ladybugs that’s their business. But that was the last time I contributed to wikipedia and even though I have thousands of photos that could improve dozens of wikipedia pages, I’ve never uploaded another one. I’ve had people specifically come to me where I’ve had unique photos asking me to contribute them to wikipedia and I usually just say no and remind them of my ladybug story. If I have a unique photo for a wikipedia page that they are missing an image for and I upload it, what good is it if some dumb ass editor is just going to delete the photo a few weeks later for some lame reason.

At least with wikipedia though the censorship was done by someone with a name. Allowing anonymous people, as seems to be happening now on Quora, the ability to delete entries is even worse.

I’m not sure what the answer is, but I know that I really don’t want to be involved with any social network where they give “special” users secret anonymous powers to censor. The best communities are run transparently. Allowing anonymous censorship is anything but transparency.

I hope Quora reconsiders this sort of censorship and at a minimum requires editors to disclose their name when they decide to censor a user. This might not be convenient for censors, who frequently like to hide in the shadows, but it’s certainly better for community.

Remember Deepa Praven? I blogged about her Flickr account back on January 10th after Flickr nuked her account without any warning or explanation. Since that time her protest photo above has logged almost 7,000 views and she’s no closer to knowing why flickr nuked her account than the day that they did it.

She hasn’t given up on her quest to get a reason out of Flickr for deleting her account though, and after getting three previous non-answer emails from them over the past few weeks, this morning they seem to have finally given her an official answer on why her account was deleted.

From Flickr:

“Hi there,

Thank you for your understanding,
Cathryn”

The only problem is though, according to Deepa she said she hasn’t participated in any discussions or group threads in Flickr for over a year. And she felt that her content very much adhered to the Flickr Guidelines.

How frustrating.

So let me see if I have this down right.

A paid Pro account — a paying customer — a long-term customer who has been on a site for three years — who says she’s put over 10,000 hours into her Flickrstream asks Flickr for a reason on why they inexplicably nuke her account and she has to wait two weeks to get that sort of a BS answer? Is this what Yahoo meant when they spent $100 million last year promoting the message “The Internet is Under New Management Yours?” Is it too much to expect a modicum of real customer service for paying members?

The fact of the matter is that Deepa probably got screwed over by Flickr and they don’t give a shit and don’t have the human decency to actually apologize and take responsibility for the mistake. And even if they wanted to try and make it right, they can’t. Because Flickr doesn’t keep a backup of your account once they delete you. That’s right, there is no safety net. If some underling in the censorship division has a bad day or decides that they don’t like you or whatever and they press the nuke button there is no undo. You have no recourse. That’s just plain irresponsible and shows how little actually Yahoo cares about their users and our content.

“Thank you for understanding?” What an insulting way to sign off after destroying thousands of hours of somebody’s work for no sensible reason at all.

Deepa hasn’t given up yet and is still going back to Flickr to try, yet again, to get a better answer than this. In the meantime I’ve heard that Yahoo Product Chief Blake Irving is going to be stopping by Flickr. Blake, if this really is your vision for what Yahoo stands, for I’m disappointed. I hope you take the time to institute a rational, reasonable, sane and responsible process at Flickr whereby deleted accounts actually go through a due process review and build the ability to reinstate accounts for bad deletes or appeals.

We are paying customers who spend thousands of our hours creating content to drive traffic and advertising dollars to *your* site.

Deepa deserves better than this — we all do.

I was disappointed this weekend to learn that a friend of mine and fellow DMU member “Fireman Johnny” had his long-standing Flickr account of 5 years deleted without warning by Flickr Friday night.

Johnny is a Washington State firefighter who was very active in our DMU group where he could always be counted on to tell us great stories about what real life as a firefighter was like. In addition to being active in our DMU group, Johnny also administered two other groups on Flickr. One that warned about the dangers of drinking and driving and another “The Brave Soldiers and the families who support them” which was a central place for military families to come talk about issues. Now that Johnny’s been deleted, he can no longer administer this group which was very important to him and a number of families of American soldiers who went there for support.

Johnny’s as genuine a guy as they come.

So why did Flickr nuke Johnny’s account?

This is Flickr’s official answer back to him:

Hello,

-Flickr staff

The thread referenced by Flickr has also been deleted from Flickr now as well.

And what was the thread about?

Johnny was upset that a level 3 sex offender (the worst 3% of all offenders) with previous convictions for child molestation had moved into his neighborhood next to a school. Johnny was upset by this and so he posted a thread about this in DMU on Flickr along with the molester’s *publicly available information* from a state run sex offender registry. The registry is public information and anyone can access it here.

The registry has no stipulation against sharing or republishing the information and in fact even has a “tell a friend” button right on the form where you can put in a friend’s email address and have the entry sent to them automatically.

In the thread Johnny never threatened anyone. He simply posted the public info sheet on this sex offender (freely available to anyone on the internet) and then talked about his frustration with the situation in his neighborhood. But apparently he violated Flickr’s policy against “venting ones frustrations online.”

Because Flickr has no undo account deletion, Johnnys 5-year account is now permanently erased.

Fireman Johnny has started a new Flickr account as Firefighter Johnny, but unfortunately his previous five years, including all his photos and entire digital existence on Flickr have been wiped completely off of planet Flickr.

I quite honestly don’t know what to do about these reckless and random account deletions that seem to be happening more and more frequently on Flickr. If Fireman Johnny can be deleted, any of us can be deleted. Being upset about a level 3 sex offender and posting about it on Flickr absolutely should not get your account deleted. Johnny was upset that this guy moved into his neighborhood right by an elementary school. That’s a natural reaction. He shared his upsetting news in a thread on Flickr and whamo, the Flickr police nuked his account right out from underneath him.

Another DMU brother hits the dust, and a good one at that.

That sucks.

Blake Irving, if you really care about Flickr like you claimed Friday in your tweet, you’ll fix this mess.

Account deletions should not be immediate, permanent and irrevocable. If we invest thousands of hours of our online lives into Flickr we *deserve* an appeal process. We *deserve* due process before our digital lives are deleted. We *deserve* an opportunity to take self-corrective action before you nuke us out of existence.

We entrust you with our digital lives. Have some respect for the content we bring to Flickr. Have some basic human decency. Because without our content your Flickr is nothing. Flickr only works because of our generosity in sharing our content. Acknowledge that and show us some respect.

Why couldn’t you have just told Johnny that you had a problem with his thread and that if he didn’t delete it you’d nuke him? Why couldn’t you have just nuked the thread and left his account alive? Why destroy a 5-year account, his administration of other important groups and his whole digital life on Flickr?

Johnny didn’t deserve this. Thanks for making Flickr a little bit safer for child molesters and a little bit more hostile and fearful for the rest of us Yahoo.

Nice work indeed Flickr!