Public Service Announcement - Private Photos on AFF are NOT Private

A few months ago AFF added a feature called Activities.  It list your status, friends you’ve accepted, what sections of your profile information that you’ve update, and photos that you have uploaded, like the social network sites.

We uploaded some photos of us with our faces visible recently.  We intended to share these only with selected people via the email system.  I was cautious to be sure they were not available for everyone to see.  And if you go to our photo page, no one can see them.  Today I was perusing AFF and by chance decided to view our profile and was surprised to see our faces in the Activities section.  Right there for everyone that clicks on our profile to see.  Even free members.  Everyone!

After noticing this, I did some looking around and saw a face picture of a man we met that is keeping his AFF activities from his wife.  We only met him for drinks and it was obvious that he had everything to lose if she found out.  But there on his profile page is a one inch square picture of his face.  No denying it’s him with that pic.

I immediately started looking for a way to delete this activity update, but that doesn’t seem to be an option except for the current status.  After a half hour, while I considered deleting our photos and even deleting our entire account, I was able to get them removed from the Activity section (and keep them in a private album).

By default, AFF shows ALL the photos you’ve uploaded in the Activities section, even if you made the album private.  Here is what you do to fix it:  Click the Activities tab.  Select “Preferences” in the list on the left.  Change “Upload a photo to an album” to No.  Now you would think they would be gone, but they weren’t.  Maybe I just didn’t wait long enough.  So I took these additional steps:  Navigate to “Manage Photos”.  Create a new album and set the privacy settings as you like.  Drag and drop photos from your other album to the new one.  Now they should be gone from the Activities section.  You might be able to drag and drop them back in the original album if you like, but I didn’t try.

Hope this helps someone avoid so embarrassment.

Oh, we’re going out to meet a couple tonight.  Hopefully there will be something more fun to write about soon.