Balaji’s Blog

A follow-up on Flickr feed privacy

Talk about shooting your mouth off

A while back I had made a long-ish post about the Recent comments feed on Flickr and how the lack of authentication could allow people to see your non-public photos.

Well I recently had posted some photos to my Flickr photostream, that were in fact marked as private (for friends & family only) and one of them recently attracted a comment.

Guess what – they never showed up in my RSS reader. That’s when I took a closer look at the description for the recent comments feed, and I realized it says “All comments posted to your public photos and/or sets.”

D-oh! So that’s how Flickr is overcoming the lack of authentication issue. Private photos and messages never appear in RSS.

I’m partly relieved and partly annoyed. Relieved – since that means your private photos are still private. Annoyed – because this means there is a chance that someone might miss these comments. Since you have to log into Flickr to see these comments, if you happen to be one of those Flickr “superstars” who attract lots of comments right off the bat, there is a good chance comments on private photos will get lost.

Anyhoo, just wanted to say “my bad, my bad!”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 10:38 am and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.