This doesn't seem to be anything that has been exploited for "identity theft" of any usual kind, and the half-dozen warnings I've seen in the past week or two are mostly directed at "young people" who might be into posting "sexy stuff" for their friends.

The purpose(?) for making the photos inside a Private folder accessible was/is so that you can send the individual photo URL to someone you do want to have look at it, without giving that person access to the rest of the photos in the folder. The "hole in the bucket" is the way the site creators intended it to work.

It does require the use of "illicit" and probably illegal software for someone to "fusk" into a person's pages to extract the individual pictures from a Private folder; but the program(s) can be obtained easily and the "fusking" is apparently quite easy to do.

The warnings are mostly just a reminder that nothing is really private once you click "Send" and Photobucket is just one of many sites with more of an "appearance of privacy" than any reality of same.

This is one of my concerns about the recent fad in "cloud storage" but apparently I'm about the only one concened. (The other two haven't commented much.) Claims about security are poorly and vaguely substantiated, and some "RB" might put her stuff beside my junk and make the whole site a target worth penetrating. I figure it's safer on my own hardware, since the locals at least can tell from the old sofa in the front yard and the flowers in the old "whiteware" that there's nothin' to steal more'n about half a six pack.

John