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Oakland PD Using Flickr Photos To Identify Looters

Thomas Hawk — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 17:04:04 +0000

I saw an article on the the San Francisco Chronicle web site today entitled “Oakland Police Looking for Looting Suspects.” The article reports on the Oakland Police Department’s latest efforts to prosecute looters who participated in last week’s Johannes Merserle protest that turned violent with rioting and looting taking place after dark. Oakland PD has now released a number of photos of alleged looters from that evening’s protest.

The people in the photos are “involved criminal activity” and could face arrest and prosecution, said Officer Jeff Thomason, a police spokesman.

Interestingly enough I recognized several of the photographs that the Oakland PD had released as my own photos that I’d taken the night of the riots and had posted to my own Flickr account. I was never contacted by the Oakland PD regarding their use or distribution by Oakland PD. It’s interesting to see law enforcement taking photos by citizen media and using them this way. I wonder about the legality behind this sort of use. Would the Oakland PD be able to also rebroadcast or redistribute photos or video from established mainstream media? And I wonder if the police have to abide by the copyrights of individual photographers in redistributing their work or if they have some sort of legal protection.

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Mark Zuckerberg Is Hesitant Going Fully ‘Public’ With His Facebook Profile

Jordan McCollum — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:29:30 +0000

Mark Zuckerberg and I aren’t Facebook friends. That’s cool; I don’t know him. Until recently, all I could see of his profile was his picture, networks and friend list. But this morning, either the Facebook CEO had decided that’s what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, or even he didn’t know what the new privacy settings changed.

I’m going to guess that it was B, because since the articles on True Slant and ValleyWag have run, Zuckerberg’s profile is a lot more private.

On his Page (where you can be his fan, not to be confused with his profile), Zuckerberg defends the change:

For those wondering, I set most of my content on my personal Facebook page to be open so people could see it. I set some of my content to be more private, but I didn’t see a need to limit visibility of pics with my friends, family or my teddy bear

Oh, really? Because when I try to visit his profile, I get a “Mark only shares some of his profile information with everyone.” message at the top of his profile, and no photos.

Zuckerberg does still share some of his info with everyone: his basic info, personal info (only the about me: “i’m trying to make the world a more open place.”), education and work, and five of the pages he’s a fan of. (These five rotate; screen caps from the privacy changes indicate he has 17 pages.) Also public: his links, friends and events.

There is, of course, another possibility as to why some people like Kashmir Hill can see his photos—they have mutual friends (Hill’s is another Facebook employee). When you update your privacy settings, the new default setting for photos is to make them visible to “Friends of Friends.” (I’ve contacted Ryan Tate to see if he also has at least one mutual friend, but haven’t heard back yet. Mark and I share no friends.)

But really, as Facebook is pushing more people to go public, and if Zuckerberg is really “trying to make the world a more open place,” he could do a lot more opening himself. The CEO of the site might be seen as an example to users—and if he really wants them to go public, should he be willing to do the same?

What do you think? Was this an accident on Zuckerberg’s part, or because Tate and Hill have mutual friends?

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Flickr Just Now Allowing Connectivity With Twitter

Frank Reed — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:27:18 +0000

VentureBeat reports that Flickr is finally enabling its users to tweet their photos on the service.

What took them so long? Flickr now has a built-in feature that lets members tweet their photos. “You can upload directly to Flickr and Twitter simultaneously, or tweet a photo already on Flickr, using a special short Flic.kr URL,” says the company’s FAQ. It also explains how to post photos from your phone, and how to tweet from Flickr.

Flickr spelled out the “how to’s” in the following from their PR firm

To use Flickr 2 Twitter, members need to first authorize Flickr to post to their Twitter accounts. Once authorized, members will be able to tweet photos from the “Blog This” button on their photo page or from their mobile devices.

Mobile uploading is possible once members enable their Upload by Email settings (unique Flickr email upload address + “2twitter”). After you’ve successfully tweeted your Flickr photo, it will look something like this.

Is there anything else out there that hasn’t joined the Twitter trend?

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The Art Of Making Yourself Look Better Online

Rohit Bhargava — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 19:47:00 +0000

There is no hotel on Santorini that doesn’t look amazing in the photos on their website. They all show rooms with white washed walls and clear blue exteriors. Glasses of wine on tables overlooking amazing sunsets. Beauty products are the same online, promising supermodel style complexions with no wrinkles in sight. Flickr is full of photos that are "tweaked" in some way to slightly increase their beauty, and the tricks that used to be only in the realm of tabloid photo editors are now available to us all.

With a simple filter, you can remove anything from red eye to love handles in a photo, and change your skin tone to give yourself that tan you wish you had too. We even have a word for images that we believe have been altered, calling them "photoshopped." In this overly perfected world of online imagery, there is such a thing as looking too good online. It’s hard to trust in images that are too perfect. They just aren’t believable.

There are a handful of sites that have started to uncover the solution to this problem. TripAdvisor lets users post their own images of a hotel. Without the benefit of a fisheye lens, the rooms look the size they actually are, and any customer can get a more real picture of what their room may actually look like. On Amazon, you can upload customer images of any product – so people not only get the manufacturer’s photo, but get to share their own. These images are often real and unfiltered. They are the ones that add dimension and inspire trust. Ironically, they may even be the ones that contribute most to converting a potential customer.

What these sites know is that a hastily taken photo with a simple point and shoot reveals a truth that no professionally photoshopped image will. Ultimately, it is the combination of both that gives your customers a real sense of what they are about to buy, and helps to minimize the chance that they will be disappointed with what they get. Sometimes being less than perfect can be the best way to sell.

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Picasa Web Albums Get Lock Option

Philipp Lenssen — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:47:56 +0000

Google added an option to their photo gallery app Picasa Web Albums offering you to lock albums. The option is named “Sign-in required to view,” meaning only people you share the album with are meant to access it, after signing in with their Google account. The pictures themselves – like this image from a sign-in album – are still technically public, though the URLs are probably cryptic enough to stop people from simply guessing them (it might still be better to password-protect even the image URL itself).

In the past, Google already offered (and continues to offer) what they call “unlisted” albums, but those were troubled with privacy issues from time to time. For instance, in the beginning you could simply try guessing the album title (say, a title like “Private”) to get to the unlisted album. Recently, Google fixed a vulnerability with how outgoing links were potentially passing on the unlisted album URL’s authentication key to third-party sites due to the referrer field. Also, sometimes sharing just a single photo caused you to potentially share access to the whole album. In fact, this issue remains even for “sign-in” albums: when you select “Share Photo" for a single photo in a sign-in album, the recipient will be able to view your full album.

In other news, Google Picasa software product manager Mike Horowitz has left Google to join Fetch Technologies.

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SmugMug Taps Amazon For SmugVault Storage

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 23:04:53 +0000

Image sharing site SmugMug opened a new service to handle the storage of larger image formats, as well as any other files their users wish to store.

The ongoing shift of people’s memories from analog to digital formats led to the creation of ever-expanding storage options. But even the most substantial memory cards fill to capacity, leaving people looking for either more cards, or an option to store their images externally.

SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill said his company’s new service, SmugVault, picks up where SmugMug leaves off in terms of storing images. SmugMug provides unlimited storage of common JPEG, GIF, and PNG files; photographers who wish to keep RAW, TIFF, and PSD files among others can opt for a SmugVault subscription.

SmugMug offers SmugVault via Amazon’s S3 storage service. They plan to charge 22 cents per gigabyte of storage per month, plus a recurring $1 monthly fee. Data transfer fees vary on gigabytes in and out of SmugVault.

Users manage the storage through their existing SmugMug interface. SmugVault accepts other file types like Word and Excel documents for storage.

The service should appeal to the casual photographer who wish to ensure the safety of their photos and other electronic documents on an ongoing basis. CenterNetworks cited Zoomr’s Thomas Hawk on the expense heavy photographers would incur: someone with only 500GB of images would have to pay $110 per month for the storage.