Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Apple Censors an iPhone Dictionary

The way you buy apps for the iPhone is by using Apple's AppStore. Apple has a policy of reviewing all the apps before letting them be sold. This might well be good to prevent viruses and malicious code from making it onto iPhones. They also review and rate apps for content much like movies have ratings. Unfortunately their review policy has been question and various apps have been rejected for really stupid reasons.

Daring Fireball describes the latest and I think worst example of this in Ninjawords: iPhone Dictionary, Censored by Apple "Apple requires you to be 17 years or older to purchase a censored dictionary that omits half the words Steve Jobs uses every day."

One of my favorite features of the mac is the built-in system wide dictionary provided by The New Oxford American Dictionary. It's also easy to use, hover the mouse over a word in just about any app (well any cocoa app) and hit option-command-d and a definition appears in the popup. This comes free with all macs. It has all the words listed as objectionable in the article; including their "vulgar" definitions. Apparently the parental controls has a “Hide profanity in Dictionary” checkbox.

Seems like the equivalent for the AppStore would be an uncensored 17+ version of the dictionary and a censored all-ages version. Since it seems that such reviewing mistakes happen weekly at the AppStore, it would also be reasonable to replace someone running the review policy.

No comments: