Alex Reid

One of Yahoo.com’s Web Designers had his cell phone stolen, but a program he had installed on the phone automatically posted the images captured with the device on his Flickr account.

It is an amazing story that echoes my recent thread about shaming bad people. Even if Flickr is owned by Yahoo, this is not the work of a marketing ploy as many jaded web marketers believe.

Here’s a pretty good shot of someone’s Chihuahua.

The thief – or whoever bought the phone from the thief – appears not to have known the software keeps running even with a different user or SIM-card. So their shots were viewed thousands of times by people on the Web.

Despite assertions from the independent makers of the software that the tale is not a promotional stunt on their part, some Web users — who may have fallen for so-called “guerrilla marketing” tactics in the past — rounded on Clemens, accusing him of making the story up.

“This is totally a viral marketing campaign … It’s a nice implementation, with just enough flaws to be found out fairly quickly, but believable enough,” says a relatively polite contributor to one of many strings of comment to the story.

“I’ve entered into some surreal world,” Clemens told Reuters.

“People assume I’m doing it for self-promotion, marketing, a hoax or something like that. I’m talking to you because I want it to be known that it’s not a hoax. I’m just too ordinary. I’m just too unclever for that.”

He says the experience has been a lesson in the way the modern Web works: “(On the Web today), you can no longer have a separate — private and public — world. It makes you realize you have to be even more honest and careful.”

He has now disabled the software and says he is not seeking justice, revenge, or even his mobile phone. He would quite like his life back.