Photo hosting and privacy of your photos

Periodically, complaints of users like “I put a photo on VKontakte, then removed it, but it is still available,” to which Durov replies, “This is a social network, there is nothing to hide, I had to think before I put the photo” and even there is a theoretical justification: “we are not a hot fragmentation.” In principle, if we are talking about social networks, then this approach has the right to exist (although I personally disagree with it). But let's see how things are on photo hosting sites that are not social networks, but are created specifically for storing and sharing photos.



Let's start with google picasa:
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Create a closed album (visible only to the owner, in this case to me):
Closed album

Here, even a lock in the properties of the album is (at the bottom of the screenshot, and not a link to the album):



Naturally, no one will see the contents of this link - the album is really closed.

But a reference to the photo inside the album:

This is my secret picture.

Do you think the photo is closed from prying eyes? Google does not agree with you: the photo is available to all. If, for example, you installed some “spy” toolbar on your browser (there were stories about how Yandex indexed what was not needed), then your photos from private albums will be available to the whole world.

It can be argued that if you do not want your photo to be seen by anyone, do not post it on the network, but this is not quite true - it’s a closed album and closed so that the photos are not accessible to anyone except their owner. In addition, such albums are often used to back up photos (if at home a fire-flood-earthquake-poured coffee on a laptop).
The situation when due to a server crash (as happened on the dropbox) personal information becomes available - bad, but this is just a crash. But when a closed album - essentially open initially - is outrageous.

Do you think other photo hosting sites are better? There is a similar situation on fotki.com and flkckr.com: closed albums do not block access by direct links.
Classmates (social network, not photohosting, but closed albums exist) - a similar situation.

The advantages of Google and Photos should be attributed to the fact that, unlike VKontakte, if the user still erased a photo, it becomes inaccessible even by a direct link.

And it all came to light in this way: one of my old acquaintances took several photos of his girlfriend (now his wife) in the sauna in the nude (and his pictures were there too) and sent this link to the album to his friends who were with him in the sauna (their friends were there too). Photos were on Picas, the album was limited (available only by reference and in theory not indexed by Google). A day later, a proud friend of himself and his friend made the album private. Somehow, these photos (direct links) were nevertheless indexed (I think through the toolbars of browsers) and at some point, when searching for “Vasya Pupkin” (I changed my name), quite nice photos of the guy and his wife were issued in the nude while the album itself is closed. Fortunately, Google, unlike VKontakte, for example, really deletes photos and after erasing the album, the photos disappeared and direct links became inaccessible. And unfortunately - these photos were cached by other services with all the ensuing consequences.

It's good that the wife of a friend turned out to be a completely sane person and said “well, and figs with them, I like it,” but the guy is still in shock.

I spent a few days at the request of a friend to "eliminate the consequences" - faxes, emails, and even registered letters "where necessary." Today everything seems to be clean ... clean.