facebook gets a taste of its own medicine as popular photo-sharing site flickr adds tagging. guess they saw facebook "innovating" with a number of twitter features and figured good for the goose etc.
seriously though, this raised the same concerns in my mind that image tagging did in facebook. what if some old girlfriend decided to post the "artistic" photos we took one drunken night senior year? at least in the photo above, you can't tell it's grain punch and peyote in the styrofoam cups.
flickr is quick to reassure, stating they have adequate protections in place to satisfy the most privacy-obsessed. "people not on flickr cannot be tagged without their permission." I envision a mysterious apparition knocking on windows late at night, but it's probably something more mundane like an email. as with facebook, if you remove your tag from a photo, no one, even the image owner, can put it back (not sure if they can't retag with a demeaning sobriquet you hoped they had forgotten, but let's hope for the best) and, as on facebook, you can mandate that you cannot be tagged in any photos.
hey, maybe this is a strategy to get people who don't use or care about flickr to care about and use it, if only to keep evidence of indiscretion at bay
If you're on flickr but don't use it much (like me), what then? will I be forced to wait until one of my infrequent logins to learn why my hipper, flickr-ati friends have been hiding smiles?
I will investigate further and report back. stay tuned.
ps - thanks to lifehacker for the heads up