Nude photos and other potentially objectionable materials have been showing up in the iPhone application store in recent weeks, raising questions about Apple’s ability to control iPhone content. In the most recent example, a nude photo of a young woman, reported to be 15 years old, showed up on an iPhone application called BeautyMeter. The photo, which apparently was submitted by one of the photo-sharing app’s users, prompted Apple to remove the entire mobile application from its online store. About a week earlier, another mobile phone application, Hottest Girl, showcased a photo of a topless woman and also was pulled from the iPhone app store.

The iPhone app store, with more than 50,000 applications, is the most popular entertainment and information venue of its kind for mobile phones. Observers say the successful app store buoys the iPhone’s popularity and adds to Apple’s sterling image as a hip and family-friendly company. Explicit content has the potential to tarnish that image, but Apple, like any company or Web site that hosts user-submitted content, may be engaged in an impossible task by trying to keep all offensive material from the app store. Some iPhone apps are developed by Apple, but many are submitted for approval by third-party developers. According to experts, it would be impossible for Apple or developers to keep all potentially objectionable material out of the app store, since much of the content is submitted by users.

Source: CNN