Tech giants need to be reigned in before they start ruling our lives

As if there wasn't enough bad PR already over Google and Facebook, here's an article about how some guy got a lifetime ban from AirBnB. He gets no right of appeal or anything. They do not have to explain or account to him or anything that would be considered fair (maybe he has recourse in the courts, or maybe not).

https://medium.com/@jacksoncunningham/digital-exile-how-i-got-banned-for-life-from-airbnb-615434c6eeba

Why I no longer have confidence in Flickr

Flickr used to be a great photo site. It was started in 2004 in Canada, but it didn't stay independent for very long. Yahoo took it over in 2005, and for quite a while it looked good. It was quite distinctive from some of the other photo sharing sites, and has retained a quirkiness all of its own. The problem is that Yahoo has had a lot of problems in recent years, and their properties like Flickr have suffered along with the parent, as they fall more and more into Google's shadow. 

For me, I thought Flickr was pretty good until relatively recently. I have even set up a new home site recently for some of my photos as a result of changing my core online identity this year. I had thought everything was well with Flickr. However what has shaken my faith in them has been a total failure in customer support. If you try to contact them, using the methods provided on their website, then you cannot get a reply. Your ticket will go into what looks like a regular customer support queue, but you will never get a response from them. Therefore, it's practically impossible to get any issues resolved.

The biggest concern I have had with Flickr, which I only just discovered last week, is that they have removed some of the photos from my albums. I only found this out when I tried to transfer the photos to a new Flickr account, and received messages that a few images were considered "infringing content" and had been previously removed. I then checked and found that the pictures in question had been replaced by templates with the text "this photo is no longer available" printed on them.

I haven't been able to determine how the photos came to be removed. The photos were unremarkable and the most likely scenario is that malicious allegations of copyright infringement were reported by persons unknown, in order to force the images to be taken down. One album with around 2000 pictures in it had 200 images that were replaced by this template. But simply put, Yahoo decided they did not need to notify me of the reporting of the images; they simply removed them without advising me in the slightest. The law in the US requires notification of a DMCA related takedown of an image. NZ copyright law also requires this. If Yahoo's case is that neither of these laws applied, then they are responsible to inform their users under what other circumstances and what other law they consider themselves empowered to remove images.

Needless to say, Yahoo has not responded to any requests in relation to this issue. I have just filed another support request, to move the NZ Rail Maps Flickr albums to ownership from a new Yahoo ID. This process used to be available directly from Flickr account settings but has been removed from there, and you now follow a process that involves filing a support request with Yahoo's helpdesk. Well of course this has gone unanswered like all the other requests. 

More than any other reason, this situation has precipitated the decision to register a domain name for the NZ Rail Maps project. It has come out of the realisation that Flickr, which has been where I hosted the map tiles for a long time, cannot be depended upon any more. Google Photos will probably end up being where a lot of the tiles are hosted in future. I am still thinking about whether to ditch the rest of my Flickr albums and move all my stuff to Google Photos. At that time I would still follow some people on Flickr, but not use it for anything else.

Useless Flickr processes and tools

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.

Switching Google accounts

Just to make my life more complex (hopefully simpler in future) I have decided all my email accounts will consist of three Google accounts, classified as low, medium and high priority. This involves two completely new gmail accounts and one existing one. At the moment I am working on switching over my default email account to one of the new ones (the low priority one) that is the catch-all account for all sorts of web site signups. It is quite a big process switching over Google accounts. The fact this blog is going up under one of my new accounts is part of the completion which has involved changing all the blogs over to two of the new accounts (I always have two author accounts on each blog). 

Some of the big steps undertaken have been transferring and deleting email, and downloading all the Google photos. Google does provide an email and contacts transfer functionality in Gmail that I used to transfer multiple accounts with, including my soon-to-disappear Microsoft accounts. As content has been moved, old content has been removed. The next step was to download 16 GB worth of photos from Google Photos. The reason there was so much stuff in there was that it included all my old Picasa photo albums, long since forgotten about, which evidently were migrated to Google Photos some time back. I currently use Flickr to host these photos and have not done anything with the Picasa stuff for a long long time. Consequently there are many duplicates of Flickr albums and these will not be going back up on the Google Photos of my new account, only the photos taken on the phone are planned for at this stage.

I had to use Takeout to get the photos (there seems to be nearly 100,000 of them) and use a download manager to pull down the nine zip files totalling over 16 GB. Apart from Picasa I also did briefly trial the Google photo uploader to backup my photos from my PC, this was abandoned when I realised it was just a backup tool for backing up photos from a PC, not a sync tool for public albums like Picasa was. I will have to find the phone photos and download them back onto the phone because resetting it (see below) has wiped them out. The biggest potential problem from downloading these photos is whether they will have an impact on old blogs, because Google stores blog illustrations on Google Photos, so if I delete my old account it does have the potential to remove the photos including possibly the ones that were used in blogs.

Next steps including migrating calendars and the Chrome profile and this will take some investigating and testing. I have also factory reset my phone to force it to use one of my new accounts so I have had to reinstall all the apps on it. There is still a lot of account migration work to do and it will be some time before I actually delete anything. But I did delete a very old Microsoft account going back about five years and it may well be the case there are still some very old Google accounts forwarding occasional emails that will come to light as this project progresses.

MS Smoke and Mirrors over Live Email storage

Microsoft deliberately won't tell you what the size limit of your Live mailbox is. They sort of imply it's unlimited. This is a smoke and mirrors game in which they can shift the goalposts any time they like and is similar to how they very quietly announced they were chopping OneDrive storage from 15 GB to 5 GB. They have in fact twice chopped OneDrive from a large amount (it was 25 GB at one time) to a smaller amount, and obviously twice gone from a small amount to a large amount.

The reason we were given for OneDrive being chopped was that they had had a period of unlimited storage and a small number of people abused it, so now they had to chop everyone to 5 GB. There was no explanation why they couldn't go back to 15 GB. Well, I just opened a new Gmail account and moved everything to Drive.

Going back to Live Mail, as soon as you hit some sort of limit, you'll keep getting these emails saying your Outlook account is growing too fast. Even if it's growing really slowly. I don't actually know what the limit is except that I keep getting these messages, and there is no actual way to know how much space my emails have used. I am actually getting to the point of being annoyed by the messages, and have now started moving mail off the Outlook.com server to another Gmail account. Maybe I will start redirecting new mails to that account as well.

It looks like this capacity limit for Live could be as low as 2 GB - compared to the 15 GB mailbox that Google gives you it is not much, and there isn't a lot going for MS's cloud services now that OneDrive only stores 5 GB.

New Uploadr sucks

Well Flickr have released a new Uploadr tool. They had one some years back that was discontinued and now they have brought out this one that, to be frank, does look a lot like the Google Photos uploader tool.

However anyone who is expecting it to be like the previous Uploadr (which was a third party tool) will be very disappointed. While it can store photos automatically into albums, they are all set to private by default and there is no way to change this behaviour as there are very limited configuration options. The software is really set up as a backup tool, not an upload tool for publishing photos.

The biggest problems I am seeing with this software is that it is very slow and often stalls during the process (I would guess it is unable to deal with upload timeouts, which seem to be a common feature of the Yahoo platform). This means you are bound to have to close and restart the software if you are uploading a lot of photos at a time. The initialisation phase of the software seems to involve a lot of disk churning and take a very long time to complete.

The only really useful feature on it is the built in deduplicator. This is the one thing that makes it almost worthwhile to have. But it could be so much better and have the ability to publish albums as well, considering that they appear like normal albums in my photo collection; they just aren't public.