WWD Coffee Break – SmugMug, Local News & the Fishbowl
January 28th, 2008 (8:00am) Mike Gunderloy 6 Comments
The Limits of Privacy – Photo-sharing site SmugMug has a problem. Whether it’s a PR problem or a privacy problem, I’ll leave you to decide. The basic facts, as brought out by Philipp Lenssen over at Google Blogoscoped, are pretty straightforward: SmugMug uses an easily-guessed scheme for gallery and photo URLs, so a gallery marked “private” is really open to public browsing unless it’s also password-protected. In my own testing it took less than ten minutes to find a gallery by URL-hacking that I couldn’t get to via search (fortunately, that particular one only contained baby pictures).
That said, the process is tedious (though obviously open to automation), and apparently there has been no hue-and-cry from SmugMug users over the nature of privacy on the site. SmugMug’s CEO Don MacAskill responded to Lenssen saying that they did not currently see this as a major issue, but “If our customers (or potential customers) asked us to adopt GUIDs because this was a bigger issue than we were aware – we would.” With the news starting to ricochet around the blogosphere, I suspect this may become a bigger issue faster than MacAskill counted on. I also suspect there will be a lot more random SmugMug URLs typed into browsers in the immediate future.
Location-based News – That’s the idea behind EveryBlock, which promises “a news feed for your block” – at least if you live in San Francisco, Chicago, or New York. They combine crime reports, Flickr postings, restaurant reviews, news, and whatever else they can find into a searchable-by-address interface with maps. The problems: if you’re not in those cities, you’re out of luck. And it’s not real clear that the internet is a better way to find out what’s happening on your block then, you know, going down to the laundromat or bodega on the corner. But good luck to them.
The Fishbowl is Us – If you think we spend too much time on WWD talking about Twitter, the long tail, avatars, and similar internet chaff, then you won’t find Ron Ploof’s “You might be in the fishbowl if…” at all funny. But if you are already steeped in the social networking tea, there are probably a few laughs lurking in this list and the comments.
6 Comments Post your own comment
Brian Carnell says: January 28th, 2008 10:18am
That was an awfully smug response. The correct response would be “we’re already working to correct this problem.”
barnabas says: January 28th, 2008 1:59pm
I posted a workaround for SmugMug’s “problem” in my blog:
http://barnabas.wordpress.com/2008/01/28/plugging-smugmugs-hole/
Not a huge deal, IMO.
Dagny says: January 29th, 2008 5:42am
About the Smugmug privacy issue, the original rule still applies: Do not put anything online that you do not want to see on the front page of the newspaper. Unless it is protected by strong encryption, of course.
Andy Williams says: January 29th, 2008 5:58am
Hi, I’m from SmugMug. Thanks for writing about this! Our CEO says it best, here in this blog post.
Of course, if you or any of your readers have any questions, please write us, we’d love to answer any questions or concerns.
- Andy
Brian Carnell says: January 31st, 2008 11:41am
Andy, the response by your CEO is simply pathetic. For a company that promises it is “safe and secure”, your CEO doesn’t seem to take plugging major holes very seriously.
Lil says: August 3rd, 2008 2:32pm
As you said it Brian the best answer would have been “we are already working on it”, in this sense I thought that one of the top sites for sharing pics didn’t really communicate well on their abilities to share privately, I don’t know if you heard about it but the photo service Joomeo (http://www.joomeo.com) on the opposite is offering the same services except that the name “Privacy” is respected.