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Censr
In a year rife with conflicts over freedom of access to information on the interweb tubes, I suppose it was only a matter of time before yet another one erupted. This involves Flickr, the online photo hosting site.
I’ve had a Flickr account for two years, and have, for the most part, had nothing but good things to say about it. Sure, I was annoyed when Yahoo bought Flickr and forced paying customers to sign up for a Yahoo account in order to keep using a service we had already paid for, but like many members, I made my displeasure known and suffered no repercussions for it. It looked like Yahoo might be that rare internet conglomerate that bought out a smaller, more innovative company and didn’t squeeze the life out of it with toxic corporate culture and asinine rules.
Yeah, you probably know what’s coming next:
But, overall, things continued as before; until a few days ago, when Flickr users in Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong and Korea noted that they were unable to alter one of their account settings: the ‘safe search’ option, which allows them to specify whether they want searches for images to filter out certain types of content. Under the new dispensation, Flickr users in these territories could only find images that had been flagged as ‘safe’ – which meant, as one disgruntled protester put it, ‘only flowers and landscapes for Germans’.
Shocking, I know.
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