We expect people to use our app for weddings, family albums, hiking trips, and their personal journeys through life. Some of our users have told us they even use it to organize their camera rolls into private albums to then share with different clusters of friends.
Recently, something unexpected and surprising happened.
Anonymous user ‘PBR’ posted 20,000 photos to Album 21862. We have a strict internal privacy policy, but based on our analytics of Brazilian traffic, PBR sparked our curiosity. For months we had speculated. The user kept the album private and we respected this decision and got back to building our product. Rather than moderating heavily or contacting the user, we waited.
And waited….and waited.
One day, PBR finally opened up the album and changed the screen name to ProtestosBR. What we found surprised us.
Here’s a small sample:
ProtestosBR had scraped the web and gathered thousands of brazilian protest photos as per the recent Olympics outrage.