CYBERSPACE—Yahoo!, the parent company of photo-sharing site, Flickr, has responded to a request for comment from electricpig.co.uk, which has accused the site of allowing photos to be uploaded that contain frontal nudity and close-ups of genitalia not filtered out by its SafeSearch option.
“We’ve been alerted to a number of public Flickr galleries containing adult material, which can easily be accessed by Flickr’s search tool, either by searching for specific content or by innocently looking for images by device,” Electric Pig reported Monday.
“The tip off prompted us to replicate his searches, and delve a little deeper,” the article continued. “What we found surprised us. Even with Flickr’s SafeSearch filtering enabled, plenty more nude photos as well as groups for sharing lewd images popped onto our screen. Even the text of group names contained explicit language, and was not blocked by Yahoo!’s security measures.”
Apparently not satisfied with its immediate response to the accusation Monday, Yahoo! responded Wednesday with the additional following comment:
“Flickr is a community of members who share millions of new photos every day. As the site has grown, we’ve continued to introduce new tools and features to ensure that all of our members have a safe and fun experience – from privacy controls over who can view a member’s photos to SafeSearch, a flagging system that requires our members to label their content as ‘Safe’, ‘Moderate’ or ‘Restricted’ so members only see the images they want to see.
“In joining Flickr, our members agree to abide by the Yahoo! Terms of Service and our Community Guidelines. Those guidelines require that our members label the content that they are uploading. Unfortunately, like the real world, there are individuals who feel that the rules don’t apply to them and fail to label their content appropriately.
“Members who stumble across what they feel may be inappropriate content on Flickr can either flag a photo so it can be reviewed by the Flickr Team or file a query via the ‘Report Abuse’ link that’s available in the footer of every page on Flickr. Report Abuse is a high priority area that’s managed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
“Flickr and Yahoo! take child protection extremely seriously and are active members of the Internet Watch foundation.”
