Ricardo's Blog: Rage Against Flickr censorship

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flickr protest

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Flickr is the largest and most popular photo sharing service in the Internet.  Its members are photography enthusiasts who range from family shooters to awarded professionals and artists.  Flickr recently introduced a system of filters that allows users to mark restricted content.  The decision to mark content as such can be done by the users posting the photos or by other members who might be concerned by the material.  Sounds like a reasonable plan... but flickr is learning the hard way that it is not easy at all to filter out photographic material.

A couple of photographers that felt offended by having their photos filtered unvoluntarily (including some baseball shots in one case) started to build out momentum against the filters.  The momentum built up significantly this week when a new international release prevented members from Germany, Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea to escape the filters (in another words, they are automatically at the highest filtering level and they cannot change it).

On top of it the flickr staff has been painfully slow to respond and now threats of a class action lawsuit are starting to emerge.  Read more details on my blog article.