November 17, 2009 | Online

Flickr: where porn hides

The Yahoo! owned company Flickr was outed as a porn portal by Electricpig.co.uk. The technology review site discussed how a reader "search[ing] innocent-sounding body parts to create a home-made birthday card ... 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."

Electricpig did a quick investigation and found that, even with the Safesearch feature, adult content was relatively easy to find.

"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," stated a Yahoo! spokesperson. "When you first sign up for Flickr, the SafeSearch function is turned on. This protects you from Restricted images on Flickr. You can only get access to Restricted images if you're over 18."

Electricpig, in a rather prudish way, declared the adult content as "certainly vulgar and, we considered, obscene." The nerds working at Electricpig really need to get out of the parent's basement sometime soon.

Flickr Criticized as Porn Portal [XBiz]

Flickr porn surprise:the darker side of photo sharing [Electricpig]