Why I Hate NIPSA and Yahoo Censorship

Update: The photo above now also seems to also have been removed from public search at Flickr. Censorship sucks.

[I am CEO of Zooomr]

Yesterday I posted up two Twitter photos to my photostream on Flickr. I blogged both images here at thomashawk.com. The images were of two collections of avatars. One for Robert Scoble's Twitter friends and one for mine. Both were tagged Twitter. The image of Robert's friends shows up in public search on Flickr while the image of mine does not.

Now, this could be a bug. But it could also be that the photo of my friends on Twitter has been marked NIPSA (short for not in public search) by Yahoo. NIPSA is a tool that many people are not aware of where Flickr/Yahoo can remove your photo, your group, even your entire photostream from public search at Flickr. It can happen to you with no notification. And unless you go and manually search for your group, photo, photostream, in public search you may never be aware that it has happened to you.

This sucks.

I have no problem with Flickr/Yahoo censoring certain images. There are certain things that are truly offensive. But even here I think that Yahoo should notify people after they are being censored.

Recently I posted about the fact that Yahoo pulled down a photo of mine of Michael Crook, the guy who baited men on craiglist only to publicly release their private information and humiliate them. When they did this they effectively killed an essay I'd written as well as dozens of comments and a growing conversation about Crook's actions. This also was not right and Yahoo needs to treat their paying customers at Flickr better.