DEPENDING ON MY viewing platform, content to and from Flickr has to jump through four hoops.
1. I must relinquish some creative control to Yahoo! Here are the terms: “Flickr is not a venue for to you harass, abuse, impersonate, or intimidate others. If we receive a valid complaint about your conduct, we will send you a warning or terminate your account.” So if someone is pissed off with something I upstream, with a caption I write or a comment I make, I might be banned forever by Flickr.
2. My images must pass the Flickr community sanity check. If I put up an image of someone on a beach, a mermaid underwater, or a backstage group mingling at a burlesque show, that image normally gets shuttered behind a "safe content" setting by Flickr's internal controls.
3. Unless I change my default settings, Flickr will not show me everything for all lookups because in nearly every category, Flickr judges some things as unsafe for work or unsuitable for the easily offended.
4. All of Flickr must pass through local censorware when I operate on bandwidth maintained by the local civic authority. I cannot see anything from Flickr when on that bandwidth, which means days of outreach spending sharing my Flickr photostreams with some community sites are days without my Flickr photo albums.
I'm a little surprised by the heavy-handedness of both Flickr's policies and the easy manner some IT staffs have rolled over and accepted the default settings of some censorware products. But I'm upset by what's happened to someone who used a Flickr image to document how she was ripped off--and then got censored by Flickr. Thomas Hawk explains.