GetParentalControls.org

Earlier this month, the UK publication Daily Mirror reported on the growing issue of the large amount of easily-accessible pornography found in Yahoo’s popular photo sharing site Flickr:

Flickr is renowned as one of the best photo sharing sites on the web. But there’s a less wholesome side to what can be found on its service too, seemingly in direct breach of its parent company Yahoo!’s terms of service. We’ve been alerted to a number of public Flickr galleries containing adult material, which can easily be accessed by Flickr’s search tool, either by searching for specific content or by innocently looking for images by device. A reader tipped us off after he searched innocent-sounding body parts to create a home-made birthday card, and 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. Yahoo!’s terms state that it “has no obligation to monitor Content”. And while we’re not coming over all prudish, or were surprised at adult content being shared, we were surprised at just how easy it was to find, especially with SafeSearch on our side.vThe photos we stumbled across were certainly vulgar and, we considered, obscene, which should put them in Flickr’s bad books. Some even appear to have been taken without the subject’s knowledge. That raises questions of whether they are also invasive of another’s privacy. Only two of the groups groups we saw were hidden behind an age check.

 A follow-up story by the Mirror describes some of the filtering options, none of which are very good.  There are hundreds of photo and video sharing sites available on the Internet, but the most popular sites, such as YouTube and Flickr draw large numbers of children, especially teens.  While these sites all offer a great deal of fun and useful content appropriate for children, many of them also openly host inappropriate content, including pornography.  Unfortunately, parental control options for video and photo sharing sites are poor.  Few of these sites offer any meaningful controls over access to content, and stand-alone Internet parental control products such as Cyber Patrol or Net Nanny typically only offer the same “block everything on these sites are allowing everything” choices as they do for social networks.    If you are concerned about children accessing these sites, you should purchase either a filtering or monitoring parental control product, depending on if you want to manage these sites by filtering or by monitoring.