Flickr accidentally made some private photos for 20 days public.

Photo hosting Flickr accidentally made an unknown number of private photos publicly available for the period from January 18 to February 7, writes The Verge. The photos were not shown on the Flickr search engine, but they were visible to those who viewed the photo streams of the affected photographers.

“Only a small number of Flickr users were affected, and now we are directly contacting them,” wrote Flickr Vice President Barry Wayne on the service forum. "The problem did not concern all users and is no longer relevant - a software error has been identified and corrected."

The problem could affect a small percentage of users, but this is a blow to the credibility of Flickr, given that the company assures users that “your photos are safe with us” and “user privacy is very important to us”. Among others, some erotic pictures of users were made public. One user wrote on the forum: "I had several spicy photos, and they were intended only for friends."
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According to photographer Thomas Hawke, “a rather significant but very carefully hidden huge amateur porn society has formed in Flickr - you just have to look for„ milf “, disabling the safe search”. It was these users who could suffer the most because of a Flickr error.

Other users who noticed an error last week say they tried to make their suddenly public photos private again, but the settings went back to public ones. One of the owners of paid accounts says that he thinks to completely delete his account, because he is not sure that his photos will not be made public again.

Flickr ultimately made private “all potentially affected photographs”, but this caused additional problems for users, who found that the photos they deliberately made public were closed. According to them, now they have to comb through hundreds of photos and manually make the necessary photos public. In addition, the closing of photos broke the code of the pages on other sites where they were used.

“My food blog was completely destroyed, and it was a huge source of income for me,” one of the owners of paid accounts writes on the forum, “Now I must not only change all privacy settings, but the change in privacy changed the code, which means that I should in absolutely every post re-insert all my photos. These are hundreds of photos. ”

A Yahoo spokesperson said the problem was “very, very small,” and the company communicates directly with users to resolve their issues. “We deeply regret that this happened,” she added, noting that the mistake was made during the “scheduled maintenance”.