UPDATE: Child Porn? Apparently There's An App For That
by Ian
July 2, 2009
The app, similar to Hot Or Not, lets you rate the appeal of the face, body and clothes of people in photos uploaded to the app.
The app appears to be having difficulty returning results in recent hours presumably because the company's servers are being heavily bombarded at the moment. Thus Appadvice has not independently verified there are nude photos of anyone within the app, but Wired.com did say the nude photo of the alleged 15-year-old was still there as of 1:30 PDT.
The app features a dial that lets you restrict the ages of people's photos so that you can only search for people in a certain age range. You can specify ages from 1-17, should you prefer.
According to Krapps.com there are also nude photos of women aged 18 and above. We've decided not to link to the original story on Krapps because the photo, while censored of nudity, still shows the girl's face. You can see a fully censored copy of the image on Wired.com.
What makes this situation so pecuiliar is the app is still freely available at the time of this writing yet Apple has a no porn or nudity policy that was just reinforced a couple days ago when the app Hottest Girls, which featured topless women, was pulled from the App Store. And that app was very explicit about containing nudity. BeautyMeter, apparently, is not.
Funnymals, the German-based developers of BeautyMeter warn, through poorly written English, that if anything illegal is uploaded the company will offer up the unique identification number of the iPhone that did it.
We hope the inclusion of this image in particular was against the developer's intentions, but you can't run a service like this without having strict safeguards in place, as well as a much more responsive team addressing abuse.
What's arguably worse than the nude image is the app provides the ability to rate the face, body and clothes of very young people (we're talking 8 year olds here). That shouldn't be allowed in the App Store. Period.
What do you think?
