No security on Flickr ?

You know that it is possible on Flickr to choose whether a photo you uploaded should be public/private or limited to friends & families. It’s quite mandatory when you expect people to upload intimate pictures and of course you don’t want those to appear online.
But I just discovered there is no privacy at all. Take any picture you have turn it private, get the direct link to the picture you get on right-clicking on the picture, and although the picture is private anyone can access it through this direct link. I just turned this photo private and still, as you can see, you can access it !
I guess that this approach has been chose as it enables a better scalability for the service, on one had you have the Web UI with the search and access control engin, on the other side a bare file server pushing gigs and gigs of data on demand with zero processing.

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2 Responses to “No security on Flickr ?”

  1. Frederic
    March 26, 2007 at 11:22 am #

    Je crois que c’est exprès …

    Les photos “private” sont invisibles aux autres visiteurs dans ton espace Flickr et, je pense… – ne sont pas indéxées dans les recherches.

    En revanche, les liens directs fonctionnent pour que tu puisses la bloguer ou la partager comme bon te semble… tu es a priori le seul à connaitre l’url, et à pouvoir décider de la divulguer…

    Ce système correspond bien à mon usage en tout cas…

  2. atryu
    March 27, 2007 at 9:08 pm #

    Eh oui et c’est bien pratique dans mon cas pour poster mes photos de nus en public sur mon site, alors qu’elles sont en privées sur mon compte flickr ;o)

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