Today I found that Flickr has been flagging some of my own personal photos as "infringing content". I only discovered this when I downloaded some albums from one of my sites and tried to upload them to another site. I then got a few emails about content being removed that had been previously marked as infringing and discovered that a few photos had been downloaded as a replacement image that had been put in place of the original by Flickr which says "this photo is no longer available".
Whilst Flickr has obviously used some process to identify images they believe are infringing they have not previously given me an opportunity to respond to the claims of infringement up until now. Instead this has happened automatically and without notice. I checked one of the albums which I had downloaded and it contained more than 200 of these replacement images. They were only notified to me because I had unknowingly attempted to upload them again.
It is highly likely Yahoo uses an automated system to scan photos and that it removes the photo completely automatically without human review. Yahoo will then only respond if the owner of the photo finds their photo has been removed and complain to Yahoo. The scale at which this can be happening can mean some people would simply not bother complaining as there are all these steps they have to go to to complain to Yahoo.
The Flickr uploader that you get for paying Pro fees for is also a crock. As I have found once a photo has been uploaded it cannot be uploaded again even if you delete the photo off Yahoo or if you uninstall and reinstall the software. It also deduplicates your photos but doesn't bother putting the original of the duplicate into the album that contained the duplicate. Finally, it makes the photo private. Evidently this is a very simple piece of software that does not serve the purpose for which I used to use Flickr uploaders in the past i.e. creating albums and uploading photos for public display from my computer, and as such is fairly useless and not worth the subscription fee.
I have also found that using an app to upload photos from my Instagram automatically to my Yahoo albums has stopped happening lately and I believe Yahoo has started blocking these apps because they are upload tools and only Pro accounts are allowed upload tools.
As I have found in dealings with Facebook with these large corporations you are guilty until proven innocent or shoot first and ask questions later, they frequently employ automated tools to block accounts and will just fall back on their terms that let them delete or disable your account any time they feel like without any recourse available to you. Facebook is particularly hard to contact if your account is disabled although there is now a system for having your friends able to raise a case on your behalf. Facebook will even suspend your account if their automated systems detect something that just looks dodgy, like using a third party app to forward posts from somewhere else like a blog, or liking too many pages within a certain period of time.
These types of experiences are why these large cloud services are coming under increasing scrutiny from regulators because of their draconian behaviour that locks people out without justification every day.
