London, nice. Flickr, not so nice.
Actually I just wanted to post something about the fact that I will be in London until Sunday to check out the RCA’s Great Exhibition, meet some people and have some funfunfun (so get in touch) – but then I read this:
“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. In other words that means, that German users can not access photos on flickr that are not flagged “safe”…only flowers and landscapes for Germans.” (Also see here, here and here.)
Oh that’s wonderful Yahoo, thanks for the localization, but you could have spared us of the kindergarten. I wonder how this relates to German law-making since they most likely just react to something with this new policy. In actually even worse news today, Yahoo’s shareholders vetoed and “rejected, by wider margins, proposals to establish a committee to oversee Yahoo’s human rights practices and to require the company to fight censorship and protect freedom of access to the Internet in countries with repressive regimes”. The shareholders were much more concerned with the company’s performance against Google.
Please Flickr, don’t go down that road. DIGG’s been there for an afternoon and it wasn’t pretty. Let’s hope they recognize this mistake and will make all photos accessible again. Otherwise, many users might actually start – for the first time – to really look for alternatives.