Flickr Tightens Photo Sharing Privacy Controls- Click here http://bit.ly/rtpm1p for full article

Flickr Tightens Photo Sharing Privacy Controls- Click here http://bit.ly/rtpm1p for full article

Photo sharing and social networking site Flickr has recently rolled out a series of privacy setting options that might redefine the way pictures are shared online. With the release of "geofences", Flickr is aiming to contain the backlash over privacy concerns unleashed by certain geolocation features found in social media platforms.

With geofences, Flickr users can specify a geographic area on a map for which photo privacy controls can be specified. A geofence can be thought of as a radius that circles the geographical location of photos and albums. Once a geofence has been drawn, a Flickr member can choose who gets to see geotagged photos and videos located inside the geofence. For example, a Flickr member may only want to share pictures taken around their children's school with family members. A geofence drawn around the school can effectively limit the number of people who can look at photos taken near the school.

Each Flickr member can set up to 10 geofences which can protect the privacy of photos already uploaded to the site. Future uploads will be automatically protected by the geofences. Creating a geofence is a simple and straightforward process: a Flickr member can search for a location on a map, pick a name for the geofence, specify the radius of the area to protect, and finally choose who gets to see the location info. Before geofences, Flickr members worried about privacy had to pick individual photos and manually remove the latitude and longitude data.

The privacy of information shared on social media has become a hot button issue. The proliferation of location-aware features on new mobile devices such as smartphones has led to vexation over the metadata captured by a device's camera. The advent of mobile photo sharing makes it easy for someone to accidentally reveal their location and street address.

The powerful social networking features of Flickr often encourages members to tag their photos geographically for a variety of reasons. Wondering about where a Flickr photo was taken can be seen as a natural cognitive function, though geotagging may also lead to malicious intent. In the five years that Flickr has supported geotagging, a number of unconfirmed reports and urban legends about privacy breaches have floated around the blogosphere. Geofences may be the strongest response to photo sharing concerns by Flickr thus far; a positive change for a company that has previously been criticized for its slow reaction to such issues.