So, yeah, iTunes won’t censor “bitch,” but it will censor “jailbreak.” Or at least it did.
For those who have Android, “jailbreaking” is the term applied to modifying iPhones and iPads to accept software Apple hasn’t approved of, and potentially can be used for app piracy. It invalidates your warranty, so you need to know what you’re doing before you do it.
Apple has fought jailbreaking for years, even though, really, once your phone is paid off, they have no right to tell you what you can and cannot do with your property. And, temporarily, they were trying to censor the term, although once it was pointed out to them that this meant apps and songs by Thin Lizzy were suddenly ridiculously censored, they knocked it off.
Here’s what they did: Apple filters many common curse words so that search results for such terms in the iTunes Store will produce results with some letters replaced with asterisks — take “f**k,” for example. And for a while yesterday, searching for the term “jailbreak” resulted in this: “J*******k.” However, the word “bitch” isn’t censored at all.
Let’s stop for a minute and consider that Apple has no problem whatsoever with selling songs that demean women as bitches, but it finds people exercising their rights as consumers to be offensive. Oh, wait, this is Apple, where “Money Before People” increasingly appears to be their corporate motto. Silly us for forgetting!
(Image courtesy haroni on Flickr)