Yahoo! have recently changed their Terms of Service for Flickr. According to this help entry on Flickr, the usage of their photo sharing site is from now on restricted for users from several regions in this world. On the page they claim that if your Yahoo! ID is “based in Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong or Korea you will only be able to view safe content based on your local Terms of Service so won’t be able to turn SafeSearch off.”
This means that users from those areas will not be able to search Flickr for items that are marked as “moderate” or “unsafe”.
What makes this new “feature” even more problematic is that if a user is from any of the above regions, there is no way for them to disable the “SafeSearch” feature, and that “unsafe” and “moderate” pictures are reportedly being silently hidden. This way affected users won’t even know about not seeing all pictures. Direct links to those pictures result in a message saying the user doesn’t have access to those images.
Based on rather loose guidelines (”Restricted - This is content you probably wouldn’t show to your mum, and definitely shouldn’t be seen by kids.”) Flickr staff has apparently also started to flag individual pictures, sets or even entire accounts as “restricted” or “unsafe”.
In their help entry on content filters, Flickr says:
An “unsafe” account is something we think of as a loose cannon. It’s not clear to us that you’re moderating your own content at all, or if you are, you’re not bearing in mind that there are other people using Flickr and that it’s up to you to not be overtly offensive.
A discussion is also in progess in the official Flickr/Help forum. Flickr users from Germany as well as from other regions have already started to form up and publically protest the new Flickr policies.
