Sorry Jay, but you’re miles off target. I’m a zoto subscriber and I recall seeing the notices a good five months before switchover. Which can only mean that the legions of bootleggers who complained after the fact just weren’t paying attention.

Anywho, I invite you to come by and visit where you’ll currently find millions of photos and no word from the staff about anything. If you want to see the sad story of a good outfit floundering, check out the user forum.

Jay

I work for Zoto and we have released a new version of our website along with new HTML and Flash albums. I hope you will drop by and take us for another test run. I think you will be pleasantly surprised.

Kara :)

First off, we only allow Slide to pick up photos that are on your RSS feed. If they *are* able pick up photos, then those photos were not privatized at the point they picked them up. Feel free to privatize a photo and then logout and check your RSS feed. Those images won’t show up in the feed.

If the privatization of the photo was done after Slide picks up the photos, there is nothing we can do on our end to get them to get rid of them. We do not continue advertising the photo to them, nor do we allow those photos to be seen in your list of photos on Zoto after that.

We have tried several times to get Slide to do updates based on new feeds for users, but have met with limit success with them doing that. Regardless, with our release in November, we are ditching any association with them due to the ongoing bugginess they display with yanking feeds. No dig on them, it’s just hard for them to attend to the various feeds they draw from in a sane matter at all times.

I might point out to you that your account on Zoto is FREE and that we clearly show RSS feeds as a feature. As RSS feeds are designed to be used by other people and services for redistributing your data on your account, I’m not sure how we are “using” your data in some harmful way, outside expectations. If you had privatized them from the beginning, they wouldn’t have show up on the feeds, and wouldn’t be on Slide.

As for the caching issue, with Zoto 1.0 and 2.0, we do keep all images intact on the system regardless of the status of the image (deleted, banned, etc.), but we DO NOT show them on our pages, or cough them up via pages/feeds. We have addressed this issue a couple of times by explaining that the URL for the photo is not publicly known if it is privatized right off the bat. If it never gets published, the MD5 will never been seen and thus viewers won’t be able to see the photos.

Regardless of whether we continue to serve the image data after the fact, in this case that isn’t really at issue. What the problem is is that you uploaded some photos to Zoto and Slide picked them up off the RSS feed. They then downloaded copies of those images to their servers, where they now sit. You then (I guess) privatized the images in an effort for them to hide them.

After you made them private, we no longer showed the images to anyone looking at your account pages/RSS feeds. However, Slide didn’t respect the updated RSS feed, and continued to keep the images on their server.

After you noticed that Slide still had them you (I guess) deleted the images from Zoto, which again had the effect of removing them from ALL of our lists of image MD5s we had for you. While the image could still be pulled up via the URL with a .jpg ending, the viewer would need to know the MD5 for the photos to get to the image. Again, Slide didn’t respect the updated feed, and continued to show the MD5 (and their copy of the image) to people. Not good.

It remains that regardless of what we do (or did) with your photos (which was hide the MD5 from users), that Slide still had a *copy* of your image, which again we have no control over.

I’ll agree that it would be better to stop serving the images on our system once they are deleted, but we made this decision based on users complaining that the images they were using were unavailable externally after they privatized them. On Zoto 3.0, we have decided to completely remove the image, regardless of whether it is being used on your blog or website – based on the fact you deleted it.

As for trying to contact us, I went back through the database of support emails and the only email I see from you was back in February asking about a separate incident. While I’ll admit web form emails aren’t the best way to contact someone, I will say that we are diligent about answering both our support mail and our forums. I know Greg posted something in our forum for this article, and got a slightly delayed response, but he really didn’t try to contact us via email or our web support form or try to contact us again after I fixed the issue that he was complaining about – a fact that has irritated me since he posted this, FWIW.

You can email me directly at kord@zoto.com with any further issues, or use our support form at http://www.zoto.com/general/support. If you will tell us the account (or accounts) you want removed, I’ll make certain the images are removed permanently from the system. However, there is little to nothing I can do regarding the copies Slide keeps. You’ll need to take that up with them, although I’m willing to pitch in my two cents if you need help with them.

As you have access to Zoto’s CEO, why dont you discuss these privacy violation issues with him personally when you next meet him.

I had been a Zoto user for about a year and was impressed about this site until I found out two things:

1.

Zoto feels themselves free to use any photo belonging to any user, without bothering to ask for permission, to be displayed in a slideshow at http://www.slide.com. No need for any login anywhere – anyone just having the userid can see them.

2.

The above slideshow can include ALL pictures handpicked by zoto from your collection without you knowing it, including pictures tagged as “private” and pictures that you have ALREADY DELETED.

No – that wasn’t a typo – zoto probably maitains a cache of all the pictures somewhere, including deleted ones, and is lending/using these to serve their own end. The photo I deleted in April ‘96 (my daughter in white pyjamas) from my collection can still be seen in the slideshow of my account (http://zoto.slide.com/p/0/chitraloc+_3A_3A+All+Photos_2C+Sorted+by+Date+Uploaded_2FDesc)

An urgent email sent to their customer service on 25th August 2006 has been stonewalled till now.

Thought you would like to know where the money for these “free’ coupons are coming from.

Thanks