Photobucket: The Final Insult

[Thorvald of Lym]

I don't know if Staff would consider blasting this in Announcements, but given several modders have previously used Photobucket as an external image host, this may be relevant to their interests.

Effective July 22, Photobucket is implementing new terms of service, privacy policy, and a "biometric information privacy policy". The gist of these changes are, they will now explicitly mine your content and sell it to AI training.

Anyone who had an account, including free members prior to 2017, were grandfathered in and their files remain on PB's servers. Luckily, you can bail out and dump your gallery without submitting to the ransomware threats: Log in with your original credentials and scroll down to the account deletion option; they will are-you-sure you three times and may claim you're not logged in, but this seems to be bugged and following the login link sends you on an infinite loop. On the third page, you will be able to download a .ZIP of your existing gallery. Save your files if desired, then confirm termination. You will receive an e-mail confirming the request.

Account deletion is "scheduled" and may take up to 30 days to process, but as long as you do it on or before July 22, it will fall within the 45-day grace period before they claim the scraping will actually start.

And don't forget to leave a review!

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I have a paid account that just renewed last month, so I'll take this as giving me 11 months to deal with my stuff and decide. We're definitely not getting as much from the paid accounts as we did.

Fortunately I myself have no personal photos on there. Most of what I've got either has to do with Cheezburger or forum skinning or smiley collections.

Anyone here who uses PB for business reasons or has lots of personal photos should find an alternative. This "you can opt out but that means we terminate your account" is draconian.

 

[Shirotora Kenshin]

Unbelievable! This world we live in keeps becoming crazier and crazier… Now it‘s just photobucket, but in this world of „we want to make more money, and more money, and even more money“, to which future will this lead to? No, i‘m not reading too much of those special theories, i‘m just watching what happens and think about it. This time i thought out two sentences loud. Anyways, enjoy your weekend all!

 

[Quintillus]

Yup. The "biometric information policy" is what caused me to delete my account. That they are doing that at all is reason enough for me to not want to support their business model, even if they don't (currently) do it on their paid accounts. It's a slippery slope to doing it on those accounts as well.

The push to monetize the free accounts isn't surprising - and has been more gradual than ImageShack - but they could hardly have found a more distasteful way to do it.

 

[Gorbles]

Appreciate the heads-up, as well as a way to recover my stuff. They'd already held my stuff hostage and were spamming me with emails I couldn't seem to opt out of, and I'd honestly given up on it all.

Images appear to be capped at 1024 * 640px, but maybe that was a weird limitation of my uploads back in the day. This is stuff I haven't worked with in years. Including a small glimpse at what might have been had I actually continued making maps for video game mods instead of getting into the programming side of things (15 years ago or so now?)

 

[Quintillus]

I have now downloaded my archive. The largest image I have found is 1024x996. I think there was a 1024 width limit at some point, though it may have been eased over time.

For those going through the process, the download-my-stuff link is in step 3 of the deletion process:

If you've already blown through the process without noticing that option it like I did, you can e-mail support (support@photobucket.com) and they'll de-queue your account for deletion, send you the download link, and then you can re-delete your account.

(The "Looks like you aren't logged in" is the part that Thorvald mentioned is bugged; this is part of the deletion process once you log in, and after you finish it, you'll see that you can no longer log in, and the support person confirmed my account was queued for deletion)

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

Images appear to be capped at 1024 * 640px, but maybe that was a weird limitation of my uploads back in the day.

The largest image I have found is 1024x996. I think there was a 1024 width limit at some point, though it may have been eased over time.

Aye, I'd tried using PB as a substitute for ImageShack but it kept resizing large files (like my DYOS pages) and by 2014 I'd given it up completely. Paid accounts might've had privileges, but even before 2017 it started forcibly downscaling images that used to be full-res.

 

[Ailedhoo]

It is possible to set a GDPR complaint? This does violate basic practices of data protection that the regulations set out; GDPR covers EU and the UK.

Of course, this does pose issues for beyond including the USA but some use of GDPR might, at least, buy time to set out a further strategy of countering. The last decades have been showing a need to counter a corporate/state panopticon over our data; consider this another front. Make use of GDPR as a argument that this new policy by Photobucket would be found unwarranted by European internet users.

 

[Blake00]

lol I see Photobucket are finding new ways to bury themselves and tick everyone off again.. I used to use them for all my website images but after they effectively locked down my account and prevented sharing of any images I left them around 2017ish.. went in Imgur for a few years, but then they started making things difficult/annoying me too.. so I gave up and finally started paying for proper website hosting and moved all my images there.

I swore I'd never go back to that bloody Photobucket site but I just might have to to delete everything.. not that it really matters as its just a bunch of retro game screenshots..
.

 

[The_J]

I'd like to note that we have currently no limit on the total amount of uploads here on CFC, so there is no technical issue with attaching the photos here.
(besides this being a chore, obviously; maybe try to keep your photos below 1 mb each, unless really necessary)

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Do they have to be Civ-related?

 

[Bestbank Tiger]

I ditched them a while back. Got tired of getting spam about the strict limits on number and size of files, or telling me I was in violation by hotlinking (after I removed all hotlinks). I just pulled all my files back and zapped my account.

 

[Bestbank Tiger]

Do they have to be Civ-related?

You could post in other threads if the photo is relevant.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

You could post in other threads if the photo is relevant.

I'd prefer a staff member to answer this, thanks.

 

[The_J]

Do they have to be Civ-related?

Rules are not different in the off-topic area than anywhere else.

Maybe the source of the confusion: I am talking about attachments to posts, where the attachments should be relevant to the thread.
We also have an image gallery. There are no upload restrictions there either, as far as I remember. These should please stay civ-themed though.

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

It is possible to set a GDPR complaint? This does violate basic practices of data protection that the regulations set out; GDPR covers EU and the UK.

Of course, this does pose issues for beyond including the USA but some use of GDPR might, at least, buy time to set out a further strategy of countering. The last decades have been showing a need to counter a corporate/state panopticon over our data; consider this another front. Make use of GDPR as a argument that this new policy by Photobucket would be found unwarranted by European internet users.

The regional laws supplement details exceptions for several regions including the Eurozone, though personally I've never trusted these pick-and-choose provisions since I don't know how they determine the user's access point.

Do they have to be Civ-related?

Well several DYOSers posted their comics as attachments (which of course meant they got wiped in the database hack around '08).

 

[Valka D'Ur]

The regional laws supplement details exceptions for several regions including the Eurozone, though personally I've never trusted these pick-and-choose provisions since I don't know how they determine the user's access point.


Well several DYOSers posted their comics as attachments (which of course meant they got wiped in the database hack around '08).

I'm going to have to do something with the Invision smileys and the Fuzzy Knights webcomic stuff I have. The creator switched from photography to drawing, and apparently the photographic version has been removed from the original site it was on (The Forum That Shall Not Be Named). There are about 3 of us who have been diligent about preserving as much as we can of this, so I'm going to have to find other places.

 

[Blake00]

Have downloaded my content and deleted my account there. Good riddance to those guys as man they caused me some headaches years ago..

There are about 3 of us who have been diligent about preserving as much as we can of this, so I'm going to have to find other places.

I'd recommend archive.org for all things preservation related, I've been using them (for free) to preserve old Aus video game magazines as well as old Civilization mods/scenarios.. I see other people there preserving comics, cds, tv recordings too.. pretty much every multimedia thing you can think of. They've got great web playing ability ie built in video player, picture display, zip contents viewers, and in the case of books & mags they have a nice web viewer where you flip pages and read like it's still the real thing.
.

 

[Ailedhoo]

The regional laws supplement details exceptions for several regions including the Eurozone, though personally I've never trusted these pick-and-choose provisions since I don't know how they determine the user's access point.

Hmm... unless by IP address via region (which can raise its own matters) that raises own data issues, particular as you note it comes to the matter of determination of the user's access point.

Overall, a very dodgy situation, indeed.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I'm going to have to do something with the Invision smileys and the Fuzzy Knights webcomic stuff I have. The creator switched from photography to drawing, and apparently the photographic version has been removed from the original site it was on (The Forum That Shall Not Be Named). There are about 3 of us who have been diligent about preserving as much as we can of this, so I'm going to have to find other places.

Thank goodness I did save those webcomics. It looks like he plans to redo them as drawings.

I suppose that's okay for The Tournament War, but not for a couple of others. They wouldn't pack anywhere near the same emotional punch if they were flat drawings and not photographed scenes.