Dear Photos.com,
I writing to express my utmost disgust in discrimination and racial slurs I have noticed in your service.

Recently, while searching for pictures to accompany an article I was preparing on the ravages of the HIV virus, I searched for the term 'AIDS'. The second image returned in the results was of a blind black man, walking with a cane. I have attached a "screen shot" of this search.

Because the subject of the photo is a negro with sunglasses, and he is walking with a cane, does not mean that he has been blinded by complications of AIDS, is blind, or has AIDS at all. To imply a black man has AIDS because he is blind is an offensive and ignorant gesture.

While one may reasonably argue that being black does indeed increase your chances of having AIDS (and that the majority of blacks have HIV), I feel it would not in any situation be appropriate to be selling this picture under such pretenses.

I would recommend, in light of this issue, to remove this offending picture from the search results.

As an interesting side-note, no references to AIDS (or in fact any results at all) are returned when searching for 'Nigger'. I feel, if this is not human error, that your search engine should be improved.

Yours Sincerely
Richard Charles William Bruce Ascot-Sinclar Jr



http://www.photos.com/en/search/index?q=aids

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I'm a graphic designer, and pissing around searching for offensive terms on photos.com is a good way to look busy. I wrote this email to them at work today, pretending I was emailing a client in Outlook.


(brazzin, Wed 14 Jan 2009, 9:03, Reply)