Toronto Photography Meetup Group

Anyone ever notice a Facebook app called "Random HD Wallpapers" in the stats for their Flickr stream?


curious by qualdoth, on Flickr

In the top of the image you'll see that "apps.facebook.com" was captured as a referrer to one of my images. Following the link (see bottom half of the image) identifies the app as the "Random HD Wallpaper" app on Facebook. While I don't have an account on Facebook that I use, I can't verify what this app is trying to do, but it does raise some flags about the potential of infringing on the use of my images. I'm concerned this may be a wallpaper app that's sucking my image into its pool and someone's profiting from this.

Anyone else encounter anything like this or know anything about this Fb app?

From the information I get from looking at your screen shot, (and based on the image alone) it looks like there's some bots that harvest Flickr IDs and automatically send these requests out. Looks like upon your approval, the app would post some or all of your work onto the facebook group, or probably to http://randomhdwallpapers.com/. Some unsuspecting users might grant the permissions and the website does seem to make money off of the materials people allow it to use (sometimes unknowingly).

I think as long as you don't grant the permissions you would be okay. If you are suspecting copyright infringement, there are tools on the internet to search for your images that are floating online.


edit: Looking through the website, I found this hilarious 'wallpaper' http://randomhdwallpapers.com/2011/12/2 ... wallpaper/

You're close, but not quite accurate I think. The request for permission only appears if I click the referrer url back to the Fb app (from my Flickr logs), presumably because the app thinks I want to use it. I never actually got any sort of request sent to me otherwise. Having said that, I think you're on the money with regards to them harvesting based on Flirckr IDs.

Basically, there are dozens of facebook, iphone, ipad, android, etc apps that access anything public on Flickr and 500px and use them for various purposes. Slideshows on your tablet, changing wallpapers, etc. I've downloaded a lot of mobile flickr apps, only to find that I cannot login and view my own, private photos, the app is just there to view public photos.

I'm not 100%, but I don't think its infringing on any rights. The app just uses its own interface to display publicly available images, not unlike sites like Fluidr, that just give people a different UI for their flickr feeds.

Interesting. So you have many images with views from the referrer?

I agree with BaRT that the site is forwarding traffic to your flickr image pages.. Flickriver comes to mind...
Otherwise, the referrer and view count wouldn't even be registered.

Is this genuinely a different interface that lets people browse your photostream, or a bot that views your images just to log that address as referrer hoping people would click on the referrer link and accept the permission request, I cannot tell.

Although it is possible that it could let people download the publicly available images of yours through their interface by enabling right-click context menu (in flickr's interface, those images would be right-click protected, and people wouldn't be able to download them), and in which case, you have a case of copyright infringement on your hand.

You guys make a good point about it maybe just being an app that aggregates like some of the examples you've given. If that's the case and it's something that works like Fluidr but on Fb, then I guess that's ok. I just can't really tell as I'm not into the whole Facebook thing, which is why I figured I'd ask here to see if anyone else has encountered this. so far, I've only noticed the referrer from api.facebook.com a couple of times, but I generally don't review the logs all the time either.

Thanks for the feedback though, it's appreciated.