One problem when small companies are swallowed up by big companies is that sometimes the big company brings with it, for want of a better term, ethical baggage.

Case in point: Flickr. When I bought a Flickr Pro account a year ago, they'd recently been bought by Yahoo!, but I still felt like my money was going to help the cool, fun people who ran the site. As time progressed, though, I became less sanguine about handing money over to their parent company, whose Chinese arm shops dissident journalists to the secret police, and whose executive attitude to the matter could possibly do with some rethinking.

So I drew up plans to step quietly back from Flickr. I'd already paid for a year, so there was no real value for anyone in making any immedate move. When my account was coming up for expiry I'd extract my photos from the site, find some convenient way to host them myself, and feel that warm glow of low barrier-to-entry middle-class social consciousness.

Of course, this required a certain amount of planning and preparation, and relied on me noticing when there was only a few weeks of subscription left. Today I logged on to Flickr, noticed that my account had already expired, and quickly ponied up the $25 for another year.

I suck.