A Man Named Mudd and a Man Named Gold
Flickr User Shepherd Johnson Says Yahoo Security Officer and Former FBI Agent John Zent Threatens to Call Police on Him After Flickr Nuked His Account
Well the bizarre behavior by Flickr/Yahoo over recent customer service and account deletion issues may have just taken a big left turn from wackyland straight into the Twilight Zone. Earlier this week I reported an update on the case of Shepherd Johnson. You’ll remember Johnson as the Flickr user who had his account deleted without warning after posting remarks critical of President Obama on the official Presidential Flickr stream. It’s still not known if pressure from the White House played a role in having Johnson’s account deleted or not, but his account deletion gained widespread attention from both the blogosphere and the mainstream media after Yahoo nuked his entire account and photostream.
According to Johnson, after his account deletion he disconnected from Flickr for almost 3 months, reserved, he said, that nothing would come of his story. After giving more reflection recently to his situation, however, Johnson said that he became disgusted over how Yahoo! Flickr and the Whitehouse had treated him so he decided to try and readdress his account deletion issue with Flickr/Yahoo.
Johnson said that he started out trying to address his account deletion privately with Flickr Community Manager Heather Champ via Flickr mail. Johnson had spoken with Champ earlier last summer and said previously that she’d offered him a free $24.99 gift card so that he could get a new Flickr Pro account after the deletion. According to Johnson, however, this time around Champ promptly blocked his flickr mail messages. He then tried phoning Yahoo’s VP of Global Customer Care, Laura Narducci, using the phone number that she had given him when dealing with his high profile account deletion back in June. Johnson said he left voicemails but that Narducci did not return his calls.
Frustrated at being unable to contact Flickr/Yahoo directly over his account deletion, Shepherd next turned to Flickr’s Help Forum. As I reported on Tuesday, after Johnson posted requesting someone from Flickr/Yahoo contact him, Flickr locked his thread, ironically, telling him that he needed to contact them privately. Johnson started another thread complaining that he had tried to contact them privately with no success and ended up not only having that thread shut down, but being banned from the Flickr Help Forum indefinitely as well. (Note: I’m also indefinitely banned from the Flickr Help Forum. They banned me after referencing an anti-flickr blog in the forum last month). Interestingly, Yahoo employee Zack Sheppard told Johnson that “you are welcome to continue to communicate with us directly,” while locking his thread and booting him from the help forum.
Not willing to simply give up on what he felt was an unjust account deletion with no response from Flickr/Yahoo, Johnson tried again yesterday to contact Yahoo/Flickr over his issue leaving one more voicemail message for Narducci and one more for Champ. Johnson said that his voicemail messages were “not angry, not hostile voicemails, just me stating matter of factly that I wanted this issue resolved.”
And this is where things get weird….
After being totally ignored in his attempts to resolve his account deletion issue with Flickr/Yahoo staff. Johnson says that yesterday he finally did receive a call from someone at Yahoo. Only it wasn’t someone from Flickr’s customer care division at all. it was from someone named John Zent, apparently from Yahoo’s Legal Department’s Risk Management Group. Zent identified himself as a security professional for Yahoo as well as a former FBI Special Agent, Johnson told me. He told me that Zent threatened to have him removed from Flickr for TOS violations as well as have his IP address banned from the site. Zent went on to accuse Johnson of harassment and said that if he did not stop calling Yahoo that he would call the Sunnyvale Police on Johnson. “I was astonished that he had threatened to call the police on a customer who merely had an account dispute which he wanted to have resolved,” said Johnson.
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While Johnson denies harassing anyone at Yahoo, he did admit to a couple of comments in a post inquiring about what had happened to Champ’s face in a post containing a photograph of her that he felt was unflattering. He said that Zent was “extremely upset” by his comments in this post and brought it up three times with him telling Johnson that his activity on Flickr was being “closely monitored.”
A little digging on Zent would seem to indicate that he indeed actually may be a former FBI agent — although I’m not sure how appropriate it is to be using that status formally against a customer with an account deletion complaint at Yahoo. In fact, it would appear that Zent has quite a colorful past of his own having been charged by a number of sources as being the individual responsible for having Al-Qaeda (I told you this was going to get weird) operative Ali Mohamed released from the Canadian police in 1993 as an FBI Informant. Mohamed was also alleged to have been a “a key planner of the 9/11 plot, and trainer in hijacking,” Apparently another bizarre case related to Zent is that of his daughter’s former boyfriend who was convicted of a triple murder over the killing of his parents for life insurance money. Zent had reportedly testified on the boyfriend’s behalf during the trial.
Johnson says that he is not giving up on his account deletion, which he sees as a free speech issue, just yet. He said he plans to try and contact Narducci again, but that next time he said he’ll leave instructions on where the Sunnyvale police can pick him up. “Yes, my 1st Amendment rights, the issue that this whole thing started over back when I posted comments in the Official Whitehouse Photostream, those rights are that important to me and in an act of civil disobedience I am willing to go to jail for them,” said Johnson.
Interestingly enough, Flickr has repeatedly claimed in the past that they have no way of reactivating customer accounts after deletions. Most recently Flickr staff confirmed this and said that they also were not working on any such feature at present. According to Johnson Zent refuted this claim. “I asked him if Yahoo! could actually turn my account back on to which he replied, “Absolutely!” and then asked and answered his own question, “Will Yahoo! do that? No we will not.” This statement confirms that Heather Champ is a liar when she told me they could not reactivate my Flickr account,” said Johnson.
I contacted both Zent as well as Yahoo PR yesterday to try and get a response on Johnson’s case, but as of yet neither have returned my emails. If/when I hear from them I will post their response.
Update more on this deletion, including additional comments from Shepherd Johnson here. On Reddit here and here.
Update #2: On digg here.
Update #3: Jason Khoury from Yahoo PR just emailed me back the following response from Yahoo on this matter: “It is Yahoo! policy that we don’t discuss members’ accounts and their activity.”
That’s the Way the World Goes Round, Plate 2
The New Yahoo Mobile Flickr iPhone App, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
Yesterday I downloaded the new Flickr iPhone app developed by Yahoo Mobile. The app is available in the U.S. and some other regions as well. Apparently there are regions that it is not available in yet (Ireland, Sweeden, etc.) as well, but I can’t seem to find an official breakdown for where it is available and where it is not.
The Good
1. It’s free. You certainly gotta love the price of this new app. It also appears to be entirely advert free which is pretty cool as well. I only tried it on a paid pro account though so maybe non-Pro users see ads.
2. Browsing recent uploads from (I assume) your contacts are pretty awesome. Viewing recent uploads and faving them from the app seems simple and intuitive.
3. You can upload photos that you take on your iPhone to your Flickrstream directly (I’ll never use this, but as the iPhone is now the most popular camera on Flickr, this functionality makes a ton of sense). Apparently batch uploading is not supported yet though.
4. The application seems very simple and intuitive to grasp and if you are on a good connection, photos seem to populate very quickly.
The Bad
1. No real way to search for photos near you. One of the things that I would think would be super cool would be for Flickr to interact with your iPhone’s geolocation abilities to show you geotagged photos near you. Especially for the traveler, this would seem like a cool feature. It would also be cool to sort this list by most recent, most interesting, and closest and also allow you to filter it by tags as well. So, for instance, if I was visiting Chicago and wanted to see everything tagged graffiti near my motel, I could do that and use my iPhone’s GPS functionality to take me right to something that was interesting.
2. Recent activity doesn’t show you how many faves your photos have received like the web version. The regular web page does show this and it would be good to see this on the iPhone version as well.
3. There appears to be no way to filter photos from the ” Recent Uploads” section. Actually I’m not even sure what the “Recent Uploads” are supposed to represent. I think that these are the most recent photos uploaded by your contacts. But when I compare this page with the recent uploads from my contacts on the actual Flickr site the photos appear to be different. On Flickr web I’m allowed to see the most recent uploads by my contacts four ways (either by friends/family only or all contacts, and most recent 1 upload or most recent 5 uploads). On Flickr iPhone there does not appear to be a way to filter these uploads by friends/family only for instance. It would be nice to have some sort of toggle button between friends/family and contacts in keeping with consistency with the Flickr web site. I tend to browse my friends/family recent uploads more than all of my contacts photos so it’s disappointing that this functionality appears missing.
4. While the screensaver app that is the default welcome screen is pretty cool, it could be better. Actually I’m not even sure exactly what these photos represent. It would be nice to be able to customize this opening slide show. I’d love to be able to set it (for instance) to show the most recent photos of my friends/family. Or to show the most recent photos on Flickr tagged “neon AND california.” Or to show photos within a one mile radius of where I am sorted by interestingness. You get the idea. Being able to customize this initial slideshow would make it better.
5. No support for group discussions. Group thread discussions are one of the most active places on Flickr. It would have been nice to see an intuitive way to browse group discussions from the iPhone.
The Ugly
1. Support for the new app seems pretty poor. There is no FAQ that I’ve been able to find on the app. Inquiries into the product over at the Flickr Help Forum are being redirected by Flickr staff to this page, which seems pretty unhelpful. The Flickr Blog has not even posted about the new app yet. You’d think that since Yahoo Mobile and Flickr are both owned by Yahoo that they would have coordinated support on the product a little better than this.
2. At least for me the app still feels very buggy. Maybe I’m just hitting it on a bad day (it’s second day released) or maybe the app hates wifi, but much of the functionality of the app didn’t work for me. For instance, when I tried to search for photos all that came back were blank thumbnails. When I tried using the contacts search feature to search for some of my contacts many of my contacts were not there and missing. A search for three of my contacts, for example (Andertho, Ivan Makarov, and Merkley) all came up with no results when browsing the “contacts” section of the app.
Later on I was able to get search results to actually populate, but it seems (best I can tell) that search results returned for any search term are based on Flickr’s “Relevancy” algorithm, which is the worst way to view search results on Flickr. This app should search using the interestingness algorithm instead of Flickr’s “relevancy” algorithm and it should also allow you to search by most recent photos as well.
Also, when I tried to search by my tags, this wouldn’t work either. If I clicked on the letter of the tag it just blinked at me and nothing happened. While browsing sets is cool. It appears that the app only returns your last 40 sets are so. For someone like me (with a lot more sets) it would be nice to see more sets included or for this page to page forward.
The new app does require you to authenticate with Flickr in order to make it work. This step was a little buggy for me as well, but after about 4 hours of retrying I was able to get this authentication to take.
Despite some of the bad/ugly comments, overall I’m very pleased with this app and will use it a lot more than I would have originally thought. It’s a good first step effort by Yahoo Mobile and I think that over time many of the bugs will go away and new functionality, hopefully, will be added to improve the experience. It’s great to be able to have this as a tool to enhance the overall Flickr experience and I imagine that I’ll especially use it to fave recent photos uploaded by my contacts when I’ve got down time and am out and about.
Remember Shepherd Johnson, That Guy Who Had His Flickr Account Nuked After Posting Comments Critical of President Obama?
Yeah, you remember him. “That” guy.
Turns out he’s still unsatisfied with the way that Flickr handled his account so he politely posted his objection to the Flickr Help Forum. From Johnson:
“I have gotten zero cooperation from flickr or Yahoo! concerning my account. The account name was shepherdjohnson and it was deleted at the beginning of June 2009 with over 1300 photos. The issue has not been resolved to my satisfaction. More here:
Please have somebody from flickr/Yahoo! contact me concerning this issue. ”
So how does Flickr respond? They say that they can’t discuss his case except with the owner privately (even though it’s the owner apparently who is asking). All the guy is asking for is for someone to contact him because apparently he’s tried getting them to contact him privately and they won’t.
Unsatisfied at having his first thread locked, user Johnson opens a second thread objecting again and complaining that he’s already tried to contact Flickr privately but that they won’t respond to his private correspondence:
“Yeah, Zack, I tried getting in touch with flickr staff via the method you suggested. And nobody will talk to me. Heather never called me back. Like I’ve said before, this issue is not going to go away until we can come to an understanding. Why don’t you contact me or have another flickr staff member contact me, this is getting ridiculous.
-Shepherd “
So what does Flickr do next? They lock his 2nd thread complaining that nobody at Flickr will communicate with him and then indefinitely boot him from the help forum. Using typical condescending Flickr parent/child language, they call banning him from the Help Forum a “time out.”
What a crappy way to treat your customers. Especially a customer that lost a bunch of their photographs.
Of course I’m still indefinitely banned from the Flickr Help Forum as well. My crime? Simply posting a link to a blog (not mine) where some folks were complaining about what they felt was an anti-gay bias at Flickr over account deletions.
Censorship sucks.
Web of Creative Destruction
And Now You’re Saying That You Never Lied
Flickr Will No Longer Nuke Your Metadata When They Comply With DMCA Takedown Notices
JD: It seems that Yahoo has an extreme policy regarding DMCA takedown notices; even beyond what the law stipulates.
TH: I don’t know how many photos of Crook Yahoo wiped out but there was no need to wipe out the metadata, comments, descriptions, posts, etc. And there was no need to permanently delete this stuff. Yahoo went way beyond what the DMCA requires and I don’t like that anyone can just send in a bogus DMCA notice on my Flickrstream and have hundreds and thousands of lines of text deleted that might be associated with an image.
Yahoo needs to change their policy on this.
February 13, 2007, 10 Zen Monkeys Interview, “Is Yahoo/Flickr DMCA Policy Censorship?”
Back in 2007, Yahoo/Flickr nuked an image of mine citing a bogus DMCA request from Michael Crook (who later was sued by the EFF and apologized to all in internetland as part of his settlement). Stewart Butterfield, who was Flickr Chief at the time, later said that while he didn’t feel it was a mistake for flickr to have nuked my photo and all of the metadata surrounding it over a bogus DMCA notice, that it was a mistake for Flickr not to have a mechanism to restore that kind of deletion.
More significantly to me than the fact that Flickr nuked my image, was the fact that they nuked all of the comments, metadata, etc. around my image. From my own post on the matter in 2007. “Irrespective of any DMCA claim about the image. Yahoo could have simply taken down the image, but left all of the metadata associated with the image,” I wrote.
I’ve been hammering on Flickr for a few years now to change their policy of deleting photo metadata along with photo deletions. Most recently, about four weeks ago, (before I was indefinitely banned from the Flickr Help Forum) I again suggested that there was a better way for flickr to handle DMCA takedown notices.
The good news is that Flickr finally seems to be relenting on this one.
In an article entitled, “After ‘Obama Joker’ debacle, Flickr changes takedown policy,” Mark Millan over at the L.A. Times writes: “One of the site’s 38 million users suggested in the support forums that instead of completely removing the page in question as it had been doing, Flickr should delete just the image, leaving the comments and other relevant information, such as when the offending image was uploaded and how many hits it had gotten.
That’s just what Flickr says it is now doing. As of Tuesday at 3:30 p.m., takedown requests filed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, will result in the image being replaced with one that reads, “This image has been removed due to a claim of copyright infringement.”
This is a step forward in the right direction for Flickr and I’m really pleased to see this change (even if it has taken two years). It’s unfortunate that more recently it has taken a barrage of negative PR at the brand in order to see this small improvement made.
…But…
Flickr still needs to go further. A lot of controversy around the most recent Joker/Obama image was over how seriously Flickr examines their takedown notices. Can any crackpot simply file a DMCA takedown notice and get an image killed? As it turns out, probably.
As part of an experiment, one Flickr user turned in a bogus DMCA takedown notice coming from “Joe Blow” (literally).
“Actually, I’ve verified that they don’t, by submitting a fake claim of my own, from a once-off email address, using the name “Joe Blow” and giving no identifying information other than an obviously fake address (“Anytown, USA”),” wrote flickr user 3e, confirming that the subsequent image on Flickr was nuked.
A lot of people say that Flickr is required by law to remove items when they get a DMCA takedown request. This is simply not true though. If “Joe Blow” sent Flickr a DMCA takedown request telling them that President Obama’s photostream was violating copyright law, I guarantee you they would not nuke the President’s photostream. It’s too high profile of an account. They would choose instead not to nuke his stream and defend it against an obvious bogus DMCA request. And this would be the right decision for them to make.
Although Flickr certainly can’t be held responsible to rigorously investigate every single complaint, they certainly can look at some of these on a case by case basis and make logical and intelligent determinations.
In my own case, when my image of Crook was nuked, I immediately contacted Heather Champ directly at Flickr pointing her to a boing boing post detailing Crook’s abuse of the DMCA by issuing these bogus complaints. Certainly it would not take much investigating to determine that Michael Crook did not hold copyright to the image that he claimed. But none of that mattered. It should have.
Flickr also should also agree to follow Google’s more transparent practice of submitting DMCA requests going forward to the Chilling Effects website.
U.S. Department of Transportation Responds to ACLU by Telling Us What We Already Know, Photographing the Exterior of Federal Buildings is Perfectly Legal
A few months back I blogged about a letter from Erin M’s photostream where the ACLU of the National Capital Area had sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Transportation asking them to clarify their policy regarding photographing the exterior of their building after several instances of photographer harassment. Well here we are some three months latter and the U.S. Department of Transportation has finally responded to the ACLU, basically telling them what we already know, that it’s not illegal to photograph the exterior of their buildings and structures. In the letter, dated August 19, 2009, to Arthur Spitzer at the ACLU, from Ronald A. Jackson, Assistant General Counsel for Operations at the Department of Transportation, Jackson writes in part:
“I write in response to your letter of May 29, 2009 to our Deputy General Counsel, Rosalind Knapp, concerning whether the Department of Transportation has a policy or practice of prohibiting individuals from photographing the exterior of our buildings.
We do not, and in the instance that you discuss in your letter, our uniformed security guard was incorrect in telling the individual that he was not permitted to take photographs. For that, we do apologize.”