Flickr is renowned as one of the best photo sharing sites on the web. But there’s a less wholesome side to what can be found on its service too, seemingly in direct breach of its parent company Yahoo!’s terms of service.
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.
A reader tipped us off after he searched innocent-sounding body parts to create a home-made birthday card, and was surprised when innocuous searches, such as “feet” and “mouth”, brought back full frontal nudity and graphic close ups of genitalia, even with Flickr’s SafeSearch feature enabled.
The tip off prompted us to replicate his searches, and delve a little deeper. 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.
In its terms of service, Yahoo! states: “You agree to not use the Services to… upload, post, email or otherwise transmit any Content that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libellous, invasive of another’s privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable.”
We asked Yahoo! what its view on the situation was, and were told by a spokesman: “Yahoo! has a number of measures in place to make sure that using our hugely popular Flickr service is a safe and fun experience for everybody.
“When you first sign up for Flickr, the SafeSearch function (http://www.flickr.com/help/filters/#249 ) is turned on. This protects you from Restricted images on Flickr. You can only get access to Restricted images if you’re over 18.
“SafeSearch works by checking the flags that users add to their photos – ‘Safe’, ‘Moderate’ and ‘Restricted’ (http://www.flickr.com/help/filters/#258 ) .
“With over four billion images uploaded to Flickr by our community, there may still be pictures you feel are inappropriate. To report them, you can click the ‘Report Abuse’ link which can be found at the bottom of every Flickr page. The queue is manned 24/7 and every request will be assessed.
“It’s worth pointing out that our terms of service make it clear that users will find a broad range of content on Yahoo!, and the responsibility for what children may see rests with their guardian. Term Number 3 states: Please remember that the Services are designed to appeal to a broad audience. Accordingly, as the legal guardian, it is your responsibility to determine whether any of the Services and/or Content are appropriate for your child.”
Yahoo!’s terms state that it “has no obligation to monitor Content”. And while we’re not coming over all prudish, or were surprised at adult content being shared, we were surprised at just how easy it was to find, especially with SafeSearch on our side.
The photos we stumbled across were certainly vulgar and, we considered, obscene, which should put them in Flickr’s bad books. Some even appear to have been taken without the subject’s knowledge. That raises questions of whether they are also invasive of another’s privacy. Only two of the groups groups we saw were hidden behind an age check.
