Photobucket new terms of use

[1freedude]

If you use Photobucket, pay attention to the new terms if use effective 22 July 2024.

Important Notice to Photobucket Users
We have substantially updated our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, and we have created a new Biometric Information Privacy Policy (collectively “Agreements”). Please read the updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy carefully as they contain important changes. Additionally, please review the new Biometric Information Privacy Policy . These changes take effect on July 22nd. By continuing to use the Photobucket services such as having us store your uploaded content, after July 22nd, you consent to the updated Terms of Use, the updated Privacy Policy, and the new Biometric Information Privacy Policy.

We strongly urge you to review the Agreements in full. However, here are some highlights of the changes: Updated Terms of Use include:
Updated information on our current services, including clear definitions.
Updated information on prohibited uses of the services.
Updated information about the rights you grant us, including the right to the extent permitted by the laws of your region, to license or sell your Public User Uploaded Content to third parties for the scanning and processing of your Public User Uploaded Content, including extracting physical features, e.g. measurements, of your Biometric Information, solely for the purpose of artificial intelligence and machine learning training and the subsequent uses derived therefrom.
Updated information on legal considerations, such as representations, warranties, indemnification, liability limitation and release, assignment rights, and choice of law and jurisdiction.
Updated procedures for resolving any disputes relating to your subscription and our services, including new arbitration provisions. Users who signed up before July 22nd will have the option to opt out of the arbitration agreement within forty-five (45) days from July 22nd. To opt-out of the arbitration provision click here.
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Updated Privacy Policy includes:
Clear definitions for terms related to your privacy.
Information on how we collect, use, store, transfer, and otherwise process your personal data, including information about the rights you grant us, including the right to the extent permitted by the laws of your region, to license or sell your Public User Uploaded Content to third parties for the scanning and processing of your Public User Uploaded Content, including extracting physical features, e.g. measurements, of your Biometric Information, solely for the purpose of artificial intelligence and machine learning training and the subsequent uses derived therefrom.
Disclosures and information regarding region-specific privacy laws.

Also:

New Biometric Information Policy includes:

Clear definitions related to your Biometric Information;
Information about the source of Biometric Information and additional disclosures for state specific residents.
Information about the rights you grant us, including the right to the extent permitted by the laws of your region, to license or sell your Public User Uploaded Content to third parties for the scanning and processing of your Public User Uploaded Content, including extracting physical features, e.g. measurements, of your Biometric Information, solely for the purpose of artificial intelligence and machine learning training and the subsequent uses derived therefrom.
How to opt-out if you do not want Photobucket to sell, lease, trade, or use your Public User Uploaded Content for profit. There is an initial opt-out period that exists for forty-five (45) days from the Effective Date listed above (“Initial Opt-Out Period”) that will be prior to any license or sale taking effect. Please note that if you opt-out, Photobucket will delete your Account and all of your User Uploaded Content. If you decide to opt-out, please download and save any of your User Uploaded Content that you wish to keep and store. After the end of the Initial Opt-Out Period, you will still have the option to opt-out from granting Photobucket the right to sell, lease, trade or otherwise profit from the disclosure of your Biometric Information contained in your Public User Uploaded Content prospectively.
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If you do not agree with the updated Terms of Use, the updated Privacy Policy, and/or the new Biometric Information Privacy Policy, you can opt-out within forty-five (45) days of July 22nd by deleting your account. Click here to start the opt-out process or contact us at support@photobucket.com

 

[the54thvoid]

So, basically, they'll be taking your uploaded content and selling it on to AI training models. If you're not happy with that, you must leave and all your content will be deleted.

What you have to hope is that someone does leave, believing their content is removed, and then find out later it was used*. That would cost PB a pretty penny in litigation.

*Pretty hard to find that out.

That said, pretty sure they all do it. Except TPU's file hosting, of course, but that's not a place you can freely visit to view pics. And who says, trawlers aren't scraping TPU's content anyway.

 

[JWNoctis]

Yup. Watch out. Amazing how it's opt-out when a lot of people would have forgotten they had an account or a photo collection there at all.

The service's been there for 20+ years. What prevents, say, a departed relative's account full of personal images of family members from being crawled into some training set, when all associated access details have long since expired and unrecoverable, if anyone still know it existed to begin with? There are probably more than a few.

Though I guess it's not really relevant either way anymore, given what's previously the norm of ML training. It's probably closer to stapling a missing horse notice on the door of the empty barn with a number to call. All too ex post facto.

 

[Launcestonian]

I quit using this mob about a decade ago, never looked back!

 

[Assimilator]

At least they're being upfront about this - most services are not.

 

[Fouquin]

Yup. Watch out. Amazing how it's opt-out when a lot of people would have forgotten they had an account or a photo collection there at all.

Oh on the contrary. Photobucket is very pushy about reminding you of your dormant account with them because it takes up valuable storage space.



This goes back to January 3rd. I have let this continue for the sake of curiosity; how long until they actually follow through with deletion? The answer is likely within these new Terms of Service: never. They're going to simply monetize it, not delete it.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

Oh on the contrary. Photobucket is very pushy about reminding you of your dormant account with them because it takes up valuable storage space.

View attachment 355528

This goes back to January 3rd. I have let this continue for the sake of curiosity; how long until they actually follow through with deletion? The answer is likely within these new Terms of Service: never. They're going to simply monetize it, not delete it.

Or they'll do the thing where they hold your pictures to ransom. If you do manage to log in somehow. They'll let you browse few a few pages of your stored pictures before blurring the rest and demanding money, or they will show you the smallest of thumbnails then blur the picture when you click on the tiny thumbnail to expand it and demand money for you to be able to see your pictures.

Ive managed to salvage whatever I wanted from my account a long time ago. I really should go back and delete my account.

 

[Arctucas]

Switched to imgur about eight years ago.

Really do not even use that anymore.

 

[DaemonForce]

It's extremely annoying dealing with PB when I've already marked my account for deletion YEARS AGO and they still pester me with this junk.
I caught another part of this insufferable spam earlier and promptly deleted it.

 

[Princess Garnet]

They're going to lower their plan rates if they're directly monetizing content users provide them with, right? Right...?

While I'm not happy about this AI state of things, the only thing I use Photobucket for anymore is hosting Minecraft images, and I seldom do that anymore, so whatever. At the time at least, there was some limitations with Imgur, which is why I used Photobucket instead. Now I sort of use both, and I've been wondering if Imgur has a total image count limit.

To the post that said they were warning about account deletion if you didn't renew, my account lapsed for years and years and years and it was never deleted. That's not saying it won't be since there's always that chance, and five or ten years ago might not be their practices today, but... it seems like they take their time with following through on that, if they ever do. The only thing I can figure out from that is that this method of trying to get lapsed plans to renew must earns them more from renewals than it costs them in storage space. The more confusing thing is that these images on lapsed plans still get shown and thus cost them bandwidth (albeit with a watermark). The only thing you can't do is access over a fraction of your hosted stuff if the account is lapsed, or upload more, so your data is basically held hostage (which, if you care about it, shouldn't be only hosted with them anyway and you should have backups).

 

[Shihab]

At least they're being upfront about this - most services are not.

Because they already got a taste of what not being open about it does, a decade or so ago. Remember the hotlinking fiasco? Some parts of the web were amusing (sometime frustrating) to navigate in the second half of the 2010s.
Not that I blame them for the change of heart. It does make sense despite being [extremely] poorly handled though.

 

[Bones]

Photobucket, along with a few other sites like them have been long known for spyware.
That's why I'll never use them for anything no matter what their "Policy" is, instead I prefer to use a site's own image hosting such as uploading pics here for example.

I don't like viewing any pics hosted by them either when someone posts a pic linked to that site.

 

[P4-630]

I only use cold and local storage for my photos.

 

[Princess Garnet]

Remember the hotlinking fiasco?

I don't. What happened?

 

[eidairaman1]

Photobucket, along with a few other sites like them have been long known for spyware.
That's why I'll never use them for anything no matter what their "Policy" is, instead I prefer to use a site's own image hosting such as uploading pics here for example.

I don't like viewing any pics hosted by them either when someone posts a pic linked to that site.

I saw how draconian PB became that I found an alternative

 

[Shihab]

I don't. What happened?

A great deal of Photobucket's fame came from it functioning as a free image hosting that you can hotlink to; upload to PB, copy the easily provided permalink, use in your blog or whatever. At some point, they figured out this isn't sustainable and they need to make money, so they changed the rules and now (then?) you need to cough up a few hundred bucks to do that. They weren't too much forthcoming about that change, and practically no one saw it coming. Half the internet (yes. this is an exaggeration) ended up looking like this:

And people, as expected, weren't very amused. (Or check this brief summary, if you're sane enough not to be on Musk's sh*tshow)

 

[Bill_Bright]

I also stopped using Photobucket ~10 years ago when they started insisting sites pay to display images. So, for example, if I wanted to post an image here, they wanted TPU to pay them. I am sure hosting 1000s, or maybe millions of images is not cheap. But they went from one extreme to the other.

I am actually surprised they stayed in business.

If I want to post an image, I prefer to just copy and upload it from the source site or from my PC, or just link to it. If I need to use an image hosting site, I use Imgur.com.

 

[bug]

So, basically, they'll be taking your uploaded content and selling it on to AI training models. If you're not happy with that, you must leave and all your content will be deleted.

What you have to hope is that someone does leave, believing their content is removed, and then find out later it was used*. That would cost PB a pretty penny in litigation.

*Pretty hard to find that out.

That said, pretty sure they all do it. Except TPU's file hosting, of course, but that's not a place you can freely visit to view pics. And who says, trawlers aren't scraping TPU's content anyway.

Unavoidable, imho.

People treat online storage services (of any kind) as free buckets that will hold their crap forever. And do so reliably, without data corruption.
At the same time, the service tries to come up with ways to monetize, while data mining services keep showing them the $$$ for access to their data troves.

 

[Princess Garnet]

A great deal of Photobucket's fame came from it functioning as a free image hosting that you can hotlink to; upload to PB, copy the easily provided permalink, use in your blog or whatever. At some point, they figured out this isn't sustainable and they need to make money, so they changed the rules and now (then?) you need to cough up a few hundred bucks to do that. They weren't too much forthcoming about that change, and practically no one saw it coming. Half the internet (yes. this is an exaggeration) ended up looking like this:
View attachment 355538
And people, as expected, weren't very amused. (Or check this brief summary, if you're sane enough not to be on Musk's sh*tshow)

Ah, thanks for the history. That one skipped my mind. As far as I know, free hosting may still be available (?) but you're limited on both image total, storage space, and bandwidth, which... is somewhat fair in my mind. If they're doing it for free, you can't really complain. Whatever they were doing to remain profitable before (ad supported?) may not have remained viable. Can't blame them for trying to stay alive as a business. If anything, I give them credit for continuing to show images and retaining stuff on lapsed accounts, but it sounds like they might do this specifically because of the backlash from what you're talking about.

I'm definitely old enough to remember Photobucket from before, but they also had a pretty low image hosting limit way back when, and people probably started expecting more as time went on. Maybe that's why it wasn't sustainable. Imgur came around later with no account required (but recently they, too, mass deleted stuff not tied to one, and I think any uploads from no account probably get deleted later if they have a low number of views). Imgur they also had some limits on image dimensions and size, or at least they'd resize them and you'd lose a lot of quality above like 1 MB. That's why I started using Photobucket again at one point.

Seems Photobucket is transitioning into a "professional photographer hosting service", or at least that's what the website gives the impression of now. I guess these updated terms are a way to try and stay profitable, but as consumers, we can never know if steps taking are necessary are just greed for more profits. If they're going to monetize the users' content though, it would be nice if plans dropped in price to reflect that.

Doesn't Imgur (and a lot of places, including Photobucket before this) already have notices about how you're basically forfeiting rights on uploaded content anyway? So this sort of just seems like more of the same as opposed to something new, and they're probably just giving it a specific mention since AI has become a thing in recent years.

 

[natr0n]

I took off my old pics from there last year sometime and deleted my account. stuff from like 2004 ish time

 

[1freedude]

I quit using this mob about a decade ago, never looked back!

Did you delete account? Try to get back into it.

Oh on the contrary. Photobucket is very pushy about reminding you of your dormant account with them because it takes up valuable storage space.

View attachment 355528

This goes back to January 3rd. I have let this continue for the sake of curiosity; how long until they actually follow through with deletion? The answer is likely within these new Terms of Service: never. They're going to simply monetize it, not delete it.

You gonna finally opt-out/delete accnt?

Or they'll do the thing where they hold your pictures to ransom. If you do manage to log in somehow. They'll let you browse few a few pages of your stored pictures before blurring the rest and demanding money, or they will show you the smallest of thumbnails then blur the picture when you click on the tiny thumbnail to expand it and demand money for you to be able to see your pictures.

Ive managed to salvage whatever I wanted from my account a long time ago. I really should go back and delete my account.

Seems like all you have to do is opt out, and poof, auto delete.

Switched to imgur about eight years ago.

Really do not even use that anymore.

Be sure to opt out so its deleted

It's extremely annoying dealing with PB when I've already marked my account for deletion YEARS AGO and they still pester me with this junk.
I caught another part of this insufferable spam earlier and promptly deleted it.

Log in to see if you can opt-out

 

[Double-Click]

Scumbag move. Good thing my account got deactivated already.

 

[Dr. Dro]

I haven't used Photobucket in almost if not over 15 years. Past few months they have been sending emails desperately saying that they will deactivate my account (lol as if I care). I don't even remember the password or anything anyway. Reiterating, not that I care. I don't think there is anything in that account to begin with.

Seems their new management wants to turn the site around and make it profitable, the only problem is that they're dealing with one of the internet's fossils, like AOL or Yahoo.

 

[Double-Click]

Yep they still send me emails too, go ahead let the account turn to dust.
The site hasn't been relevant since the early-mid 2000s.

 

[Apocalypsee]

I took off my old pics from there last year sometime and deleted my account. stuff from like 2004 ish time

Same here, a lot of my old Paint drawings are in there, I saved it on my drive and empty the account. That was... 2 -3 years ago I think. They been annoying sending email about deletion of my account back then