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Is Flickr "safe"?
Right now there's an annoying notice blocking the top of my Flickr account. It's only using 20% of allowable bandwidth, but my account has hit the magic -- and maximum -- number of 200 photos.
"You've run into one of the limits of a free account," the message says. "Your free account will only display the most recent 200 photos you've uploaded. All of your photos beyond 200 will remain hidden from view until you either delete newer photos, or upgrade to a Pro account. None of your photos have been deleted, and if you upgrade, they'll all come back unharmed."
So I go to upgrade, but they don't allow you to do it by Paypal, and I don't have a credit card. Yes, in an age filthy, slushy and sloshy with credit I don't have a card. In fact, I'm apparently such a bad credit risk that I got turned down for credit cards by two banks this year. Which is odd, because I'm pretty responsible -- I currently don't have any personal debt at all, whereas the average British adult currently owes £28,189, including mortgage debt. Keeping debt-free keeps me free in lots of other ways.
Anyway, I considered doing some cyber-begging here on Click Opera and asking some kind benefactor to spend $24.95 on a one-year Flickr Pro Gift Account so that I can keep on dazzling you with silly outfits and scenes of arme aber sexy Berlin.
Hmm... Berlin... Berlin... that rings a bell. Oh yes, it's the capital of Germany. And Germany is one of the countries that Flickr is currently censoring by preventing anyone located here from seeing anything even vaguely controversial -- from nude bodies to swastikas. No searches on Flickr in Germany can be run in anything but "safe" mode.
Apparently this lamentable situation is down to pressure from Flickr's parent company Yahoo, but it fits all too neatly into a global picture in which groovy creative internet startups get bigger, get bought by less groovy, less creative global moguls, who in turn knuckle under -- for reasons of realpolitik -- when trigger-happy judges or authoritarian governments grumble about people enjoying just a little too much of that groovy, creative personal freedom that got the whole thing started. Web 2.0 meets World 1.0, and World 1.0 wins.
What happens then is that newer, groovier startups sense a vulnerability in the megaliths, and attack the Achilles heels on their pigeon-toed rivals' feet of clay. Hence the person most vociferously attacking Flickr for censorship at this moment happens to be Thomas Hawk, CEO of rival service Zooomr.
Confession: I like Flickr better than Fotolog, which I somewhat absurdly wrote a book in support of last year, despite finding the service clunky as fuck (it may very well have improved since). I like the implementation of the Flickr slideshow, for instance. I like that I can find The Tate Gallery in a Flickr group, requesting photos of Britain to show on screens in current exhibition How We Are Now. That's democracy in action!
I think Flickr is probably better -- and certainly easier for me to use -- than Fotologue, Picasa and Photozou, the Japanese photo-sharing sites I blogged about in April (just as the Japanese now have more personal blogs than any other country, they've also overtaken us with the number of good photo-hosting sites).
But I have to say there's a lot about Flickr that troubles me, and it isn't just this censorship issue. I was annoyed when Yahoo bought Flickr, and I was forced to log into my account with a Yahoo ID. And I was annoyed to be told that my account had been reviewed and pronounced "safe" by Flickr staff. I was almost insulted -- had I neglected to post enough naked pictures of myself, or ancient Hindu religious symbols?
"Having a "safe" account," Flickr explained, "means that you are good at moderating your own content. Awesome!" Patronizing bastards! "Having a "moderate" flag on your account probably means that you are generally a good self-moderator, but occasionally things pop up in your photostream that may be in the wrong categories..."
As a relativist I baulk at the very idea of there being "wrong categories". I don't even use fucking categories, you fucking goons! I don't want to be a safe moderator, a moderate moderator, or whatever stupid phrases you come up with. And I don't rate the "safety levels" of my pictures because, honestly, tell me the last time a photo killed someone or invaded Iraq? Photos are all safe. Crossing the road is not. And clamping down on deviants, decadents and degenerates -- or collaborating with the judges and governments who do this -- is definitely not safe. See history.
"An "unsafe" account," Flickr continues, in the same infuriating school-marmish tone, "is something we think of as a loose cannon." Wikipedia defines that as "an irresponsible and reckless individual whose behaviour (either intended or unintended) endangers the group he or she belongs to". The implication is clear: you will attract attention from the authorities and we will all suffer. We have forestalled this by encouraging you to self-censor, and also by restricting your access to the content of fellow users in territories where we think the authorities might be strict. By, in other words, collaborating, in the spirit of "most puritan common denominator".
Flickr doesn't point to the vertical relationship with those authorities, though. It points to the horizontal relationship with other Flickr users, as if self-censorship were all a question of helping your friends by not rocking the boat. "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."
I'm sorry, I don't see Flickr as a "community". It's just a big hard disk where I store images, just like my Photobucket account (which, to its credit, has never asked me to flag my images -- although they did once censor a Ryan McGinley image, this one).
But even if Flickr were a community, why would its standards get set by the least tolerant corporations, judges and governments (hello, Singapore!) out there? What kind of community lets corporate caution, puritanism, fear of litigation and misinformation set its values? The wild American misconception that nudity, for instance, might somehow be offensive to Germans? We sit naked in public parks here, dudes!
So the question for today has to be, in the light of the way Flickr rates us and asks us to rate ourselves, and how it passes off realpolitik as "community values", and dubious collaboration with the world's worst judges and governments as "safe", and its users as "loose cannons", and photographs themselves -- its stock in trade -- as potentially, somehow, "unsafe", should we give this company a safe rating? And should we give Flickr our money?
"You've run into one of the limits of a free account," the message says. "Your free account will only display the most recent 200 photos you've uploaded. All of your photos beyond 200 will remain hidden from view until you either delete newer photos, or upgrade to a Pro account. None of your photos have been deleted, and if you upgrade, they'll all come back unharmed."
So I go to upgrade, but they don't allow you to do it by Paypal, and I don't have a credit card. Yes, in an age filthy, slushy and sloshy with credit I don't have a card. In fact, I'm apparently such a bad credit risk that I got turned down for credit cards by two banks this year. Which is odd, because I'm pretty responsible -- I currently don't have any personal debt at all, whereas the average British adult currently owes £28,189, including mortgage debt. Keeping debt-free keeps me free in lots of other ways.
Anyway, I considered doing some cyber-begging here on Click Opera and asking some kind benefactor to spend $24.95 on a one-year Flickr Pro Gift Account so that I can keep on dazzling you with silly outfits and scenes of arme aber sexy Berlin.
Hmm... Berlin... Berlin... that rings a bell. Oh yes, it's the capital of Germany. And Germany is one of the countries that Flickr is currently censoring by preventing anyone located here from seeing anything even vaguely controversial -- from nude bodies to swastikas. No searches on Flickr in Germany can be run in anything but "safe" mode.
Apparently this lamentable situation is down to pressure from Flickr's parent company Yahoo, but it fits all too neatly into a global picture in which groovy creative internet startups get bigger, get bought by less groovy, less creative global moguls, who in turn knuckle under -- for reasons of realpolitik -- when trigger-happy judges or authoritarian governments grumble about people enjoying just a little too much of that groovy, creative personal freedom that got the whole thing started. Web 2.0 meets World 1.0, and World 1.0 wins.
What happens then is that newer, groovier startups sense a vulnerability in the megaliths, and attack the Achilles heels on their pigeon-toed rivals' feet of clay. Hence the person most vociferously attacking Flickr for censorship at this moment happens to be Thomas Hawk, CEO of rival service Zooomr.
Confession: I like Flickr better than Fotolog, which I somewhat absurdly wrote a book in support of last year, despite finding the service clunky as fuck (it may very well have improved since). I like the implementation of the Flickr slideshow, for instance. I like that I can find The Tate Gallery in a Flickr group, requesting photos of Britain to show on screens in current exhibition How We Are Now. That's democracy in action!
I think Flickr is probably better -- and certainly easier for me to use -- than Fotologue, Picasa and Photozou, the Japanese photo-sharing sites I blogged about in April (just as the Japanese now have more personal blogs than any other country, they've also overtaken us with the number of good photo-hosting sites).
But I have to say there's a lot about Flickr that troubles me, and it isn't just this censorship issue. I was annoyed when Yahoo bought Flickr, and I was forced to log into my account with a Yahoo ID. And I was annoyed to be told that my account had been reviewed and pronounced "safe" by Flickr staff. I was almost insulted -- had I neglected to post enough naked pictures of myself, or ancient Hindu religious symbols?
"Having a "safe" account," Flickr explained, "means that you are good at moderating your own content. Awesome!" Patronizing bastards! "Having a "moderate" flag on your account probably means that you are generally a good self-moderator, but occasionally things pop up in your photostream that may be in the wrong categories..."
As a relativist I baulk at the very idea of there being "wrong categories". I don't even use fucking categories, you fucking goons! I don't want to be a safe moderator, a moderate moderator, or whatever stupid phrases you come up with. And I don't rate the "safety levels" of my pictures because, honestly, tell me the last time a photo killed someone or invaded Iraq? Photos are all safe. Crossing the road is not. And clamping down on deviants, decadents and degenerates -- or collaborating with the judges and governments who do this -- is definitely not safe. See history.
"An "unsafe" account," Flickr continues, in the same infuriating school-marmish tone, "is something we think of as a loose cannon." Wikipedia defines that as "an irresponsible and reckless individual whose behaviour (either intended or unintended) endangers the group he or she belongs to". The implication is clear: you will attract attention from the authorities and we will all suffer. We have forestalled this by encouraging you to self-censor, and also by restricting your access to the content of fellow users in territories where we think the authorities might be strict. By, in other words, collaborating, in the spirit of "most puritan common denominator".
Flickr doesn't point to the vertical relationship with those authorities, though. It points to the horizontal relationship with other Flickr users, as if self-censorship were all a question of helping your friends by not rocking the boat. "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."
I'm sorry, I don't see Flickr as a "community". It's just a big hard disk where I store images, just like my Photobucket account (which, to its credit, has never asked me to flag my images -- although they did once censor a Ryan McGinley image, this one).
But even if Flickr were a community, why would its standards get set by the least tolerant corporations, judges and governments (hello, Singapore!) out there? What kind of community lets corporate caution, puritanism, fear of litigation and misinformation set its values? The wild American misconception that nudity, for instance, might somehow be offensive to Germans? We sit naked in public parks here, dudes!
So the question for today has to be, in the light of the way Flickr rates us and asks us to rate ourselves, and how it passes off realpolitik as "community values", and dubious collaboration with the world's worst judges and governments as "safe", and its users as "loose cannons", and photographs themselves -- its stock in trade -- as potentially, somehow, "unsafe", should we give this company a safe rating? And should we give Flickr our money?
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