When Flickr was Yahoo was SmugMug etc etc
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While no one can question the convenience of pulling up an old photo on demand, Flickr’s ultimatum—pay up or go—serves as a useful reminder that the free platforms we’ve entrusted to save our memories aren’t made for us. They’re made for the people who profit off our usage. (((And those aren't even the same guys, as time passes.)))
These platforms can be sold. They can erase what we’ve saved. They can charge us later for access to our own photos, or to store more of them. They can change their terms of service and hand all of our precious memories to the police, use facial recognition to map our relationships, or use the photos for ads—as Instagram opened up its terms of service to be able to do in 2012, ditto Yahoo in 2014. Yahoo actually sold users’ Creative Commons–licensed photos as wall art without giving the photographers any of the profits.
At the same time, these companies have kept us inside their ecosystems by synonymizing photo storage and memories: For many, one of the great anxieties of quitting a social media site is that you’d have to download all the old pics and photos you’re tagged in before saying goodbye, lest our cherished moments be lost to us for good. It was so much easier to stick around the place where our digital stuff lived.
The convenience of photo archives like Flickr and Facebook has surely cost us some of our autonomy. We no longer hold the artifacts of our memories ourselves, but rather trust companies to do it for us. It’s a mistake, because when these sites go, they take our photos with them. The platforms trained us to trust them with our history. In exchange, we got not only likes and comments on our photos in real time but a vast, free archive of photos and likes and comments, scenes from our lives layered with insta-commentary. If we weren’t bothered by the fact that these archives often informed ad-targeting systems or other monetization schemes, then we should at least be bothered by their corporatized ephemerality....
