Recently, two people in a row asked me why I don’t put my pictures up to Flickr. Come on, everybody’s doing it…

Here is why not:

1. Every time a cool new service comes along that allows me to do something net-based that I might find interesting it ends up getting merged into some sort of über-ID scheme that wants to merge all my online data. It happened with Orkut (now googlified). It happened with Skype (now part of the evil eBay empire). It happend with Flickr (now part of Yahoo). It happened or will happen with countless other services.

With the takeovers come new rules for privacy and ownership of data that most of the time make the situation worse for the user. Additionally, having all your online life aggregated under one or only a few easily to track IDs carries a substantial privacy and security risk. I prefer to keep things separated.

2. The overall security situation of web-based applications is bad and it gets worse the larger they get. Random Jane Hacker has described the problem in detail, covering a number of aspects that may surprise you. I prefer to have knowledge and control over who does the backup, maintains the security of the system etc.

3. In principle (and reinforced by my Orkut experience), I have a healthy distrust for things ‘everybody’ is doing. Socio-technological progress is not always a universally good thing, so I try to keep some distance and wait a bit till the others have made all the usual mistakes and then take a look what is useful after the hype is over.

(Thats not the reason why there are no podcasts here, btw. The reason is that I have so little time over the day where I would like to listen to spoken word that I don’t see value in producing spoken content myself.)