PR Fail: Flickr Turns Private Photos Public

The way we see it, the three biggest potential PR fails for a social network are service dropouts, unannounced changes in service conditions or privacy breaches. Flickr, the extremely popular photo sharing service owned by Yahoo that is not in any way threatened by the rise of Instagram, is now dealing with every social company’s PR nightmare: due to a software bug, the company unintentionally celebrated its ninth birthday by making thousands of users’ private photos publicly visible for nearly three weeks (while they didn’t appear in Google searches, they were visible to all other users).