I discussed in my Cell.Talk column yesterday in Sun.Star Cebu the issue of pornographic images in Addict Mobile’s portal. I was surprised why the images were still up even days after PinoyTechBlog reported on it. It shows that the company does not monitor blogs.

I’m reprinting my column below. Yesterday, the central newsroom received an e-mail from an official of the company thanking me for raising the issue and informing me that the site has been taken down temporarily. I checked and it is indeed down.

I think PR officers should start monitoring blogs. An unsolicited advice to PR officers of telcos and tech companies: check technology blogs like PinoyTechBlog or go to an aggregator service like Pinoy Tech Scene, which gathers news feeds from many tech blogs.

Here’s my column yesterday:

Porn in Addict Mobile’s blog portal

EXPECTED. Whenever you create a service where anyone can send in photos, expect to receive pornographic images. Most photo sharing services have people who filter these images or a built in system where users can tag a photo as “may offend.”

There’s no such system apparently in Addict Mobile’s blog portal, PinoyTechBlog.com reported recently.

The publicly-accessible Addict Mobile blog contains photos of naked people showing off their private parts side by side with images of babies taken by proud parents who would be horrified at the juxtaposition.

What’s puzzling about the situation is that the pages contain a warning that users “understand and agree that Smart may review and delete any content, messages, photos or profiles that in the sole judgment of Smart might be offensive, illegal…Restricted content includes, but is not limited to, pornographic or sexually explicit material of any kind…Smart may delete content it deems offensive, including pornographic or sexually explicit material.”

You would presume that, with the warning, Smart or Addict Mobile would actually review the photos posted in their system.

Not only is the blog portal publicly accessible, the Smart corporate website contains in its front page a link to it.

Some of the photos appeared to have been taken by a boyfriend in one of those private moments with a girl. There is a big chance that the naked photo was posted publicly without her permission, unless of course she’s an exhibitionists and gets her kicks from having the world see her naked body.

I am not against publication of naked photos. What I’m against is its publication in a publicly accessible website. Naked photos should be restricted by username and password combinations taken from registration data that would prove the user is of legal age.

TAGGING. Smart can either get an employee to review postings in the blog portal and delete the pornographic photos or put up a tagging system.

Many photo sharing sites contain a button to tag photos as pornographic or offensive. This, I believe, is more effective than having someone go over all the images.

(Max Limpag maintains a blog at https://max.limpag.com. He can be contacted there.)