Dude, that’s not my dog!

So what is it doing in my Flickr photos?? Put yourself in the shoes of Yahoo! employee Ben Clemens and you’d be asking yourself exactly the same thing. But this fiasco turned into one of the most popular offbeat stories of the year on Digg.com and was featured by all sorts of news organizations including Reuters.

Ben’s phone was stolen on a train in California and several days later he noticed random pictures popping up in his Flickr account -- the little Chihuahua you see here, hotted up cars and a mysterious family he had never seen before. And then it dawned on him. He remembered he had ShoZu installed and set to auto-upload! The thief had replaced the SIM card with his own but had no idea that ShoZu was running and still activated to Ben’s Flickr account. Meanwhile the thief’s personal photos were being viewed by hundreds of thousands of people following the story. BUSTED!

Of course the story was subject to much speculation from the general public, accusing ShoZu of guerilla marketing tactics. All we can say is that we wish we thought of it first!

You can read more on Ben’s blog and also view the Flickr conversation that went on around the famous Chihuahua photo viewed by 277,000 people.