Has Flickr Lost Its Baring?
Londonist Mike, contributing
Without a doubt one of the most useful web applications around and the single best photo sharing doodah out there, Flickr really is in a league of its own. And we love Google too, but that Picasa thing of theirs is more Charmed than it is Buffy (in that it came late, refused to go away and in time will start throwing in more Flickr style features which like Charisma Carpenter will just stick
out in all the wrong places). Londonist has its own pool which is handy to keep tabs on what our readers are snapping in a city that offers a photo opportunity at every turn and that handy badge means that our blogs look fresh even if we are still writing about how Blair turned out to be a bit of a dick. Again.
So we were a little disgruntled when we began to hear words like censorship floating around in the wake of Yahoo's acquisition of Ludicorp and our beloved Flickr. Was the recent spurt of free Pro accounts and extra space just a slight of hand intended to keep our focus away from the sharks with laser beams attached to their heads swimming below the surface?
So what's the story? Well it seems that Flickr have been sending out emails to some of their users asking them to tag a few of their more revealing photographs as private. Is this a big deal? Well no, and yes.
For the most part this isn't anything new. There's always been the option to mark photographs as 'private', making them viewable to friends and family only, or 'adult' meaning that they won't show up on random searches or in the daily zeitgeist thingymajig. This coupled with the Flag this photo as "may offend" option means that the Flickr community has always had a pretty good set of self censorship tools. We all have friends who like taking the odd risqué shot and for the most part they are already marked as private (and it's always nice to know you are only one of a handful of people who get to see a pals nipples dipped in custard), but as with any question of what is permissible for public consumption the problem lies in defining exactly what is offensive.
It's interesting to British eyes that this story comes on the heels of the one concerning cheerleading. We don't really have cheerleaders over here as with our sport any time not spent watching ugly men kick a ball around a field is spent eating pies or singing loudly about testicles. Still, it seemed a tad odd that people get riled about breasts and other bouncy bits, but no one else in that fine state speaks out against say civil war and gun fighting reenactments. Brits tend to know which we'd rather have pointed our way so photos like this one seem much more disturbing than say bare breasts and the occasional flash of pubic hair (although this pic tagged with the word 'panties' almost made us go blind).
By emailing those users that they deem to have crossed a line Flickr may be on the edge of a slippery slope. Flickr is borderless and global and the more successful it becomes then the more its userbase is going to keep growing. To try and apply limitations on what is acceptable is is just not going to work in the long run as each day more people bring their own views of the world around them to share with others. If a person found Flickr to be the perfect tool to share pics of his or her pubic topiary, but one day awoke to find that they had to personally connect to every single user with a similar line in south of the border shaving then Flickr becomes less useful and the ease of sharing (and across platforms no less) that the app became famous for suddenly becomes a chore and a pain in the arse.
When Susan Mernit first blogged this story she got the following response from Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake:
"Now that we're part of Yahoo there will be more liberal rather than more strict photo policing, strange as that may seem. Photos that are currently not available will once again be available behind a Safe Search wall, which can be accessed optionally by people over 18"
That sounds fine and dandy to us, but it doesn't answer the problem of having to manually designate users as 'friends and family' whenever someone wants to have a peep at the 'adult' photos that have suddenly been forced from the top shelf to under the counter by the 'private' tag. In our perfect world we'd much rather see that safe search wall pulled down in favour of a protective bubble that those who want to opt out from reality can climb into and safely type in the word pussy secure that they're going to get nothing more disturbing than a damp tabby.
We'd love to hear back from readers who have run into censorship issues with Flickr and rest assured that we'll be keeping an eye on how this pans out, if only to stop the poor person employed by Flickr
to browse the adult photos from feeling alone in a land of erect flesh and cheap underwear.