The Nudity Police

Over the past several months, I have been sending my 35mm slides to be scanned into digital files both to preserve the images and to be able to put my pictures up for friends and family to see. All the slides were in Kodak Carousels, which means they were shown to any and all who would endure looking at our travels. At first, I sent out a couple of hundred slides to see how the process worked and the quality of the scans, which is excellent. My last batch, the one that finished up all that I have, was over 3,000 images.

Today, I received the following message from the company in California who is doing my scans:

“Thank you for placing an order with …. Unfortunately, we are unable to scan 1, 126 format color slide because it contains some nudity. At …, we aim at providing high quality scanning services but our strict guidelines restricts us from scanning media which contains any sort of nudity in them. Although in some cases nudity is considered art, we have had to draw a rather conservative line to avoid any subjectivity in the decision process. We do list this limitation in our terms and conditions” and they give their website at this point. Finally, “Please feel free to contact us if you have any further questions or concerns.”

Well, I have no idea out of the 3,000 images in the order they reference what picture does not meet their standards. However, in the first batch of slides I sent, there was a picture from a nude beach in California that they scanned. Perhaps the fact that the naked folk were rather small in the picture made them miss it. However, in the second batch, there were many pictures from an African village where women of all ages were bare from the waist up. Several pictures. They were all scanned. They certainly contained “any sort of nudity.”

Gosh, I’m really interested what single slide out of the over 6,000 I have sent them caused their email.

Their Policy: “…does not control the Content of Members’ accounts and does not have any obligation to monitor such Content for any purpose. You acknowledge that although … is not required to monitor or remove any Content or other information submitted by You or produced on Your behalf by the Service, … has the absolute right (but not the obligation), in its sole discretion to refuse, return, delete, remove, and edit Content for any reason at any time without notice.

“You agree not to use or attempt to use the Service to have the following types of Content produced on Your behalf (“Prohibited Content”):

a. Content that is threatening, profane, abusive, deceptive, pornographic, obscene, defamatory, slanderous, offensive, or otherwise inappropriate.
b. Content that could give rise to any civil or criminal liability under applicable law.
c. Content that could infringe rights of privacy, publicity or copyright without the express permission of the owner of these rights.
d. Content that advocates illegal activity.
e. Content that harms minors in any way.

“The above list of Prohibited Content is merely an example and is not intended to be complete or exclusive.”

Shopping Thoughts

Yesterday, I was in Trader Joe’s. While I was looking at prepackaged meats and cheeses, a woman took a packet of Swiss off a rack/hook that held several packages, looked at it, decided she wanted the one behind the first one, and took it from the rack/hook. She then spent less than 10 seconds trying to put the first package back on the hook and just dropped the package onto other meats and cheeses below it and wheeled away.

Next, while I was in the frozen food aisle, I noted a pound of fresh ground beef had been left on top of some frozen fish. I alerted a store employee so it wouldn’t freeze.

Today, in Walgreen’s, I went to buy some razor blades. They were all under lock and key. The woman who got a package of blades out for me told me that until they had locked them up, 10-20 packages would disappear a day. That’s at $22 per package retail. She told me of a nicely-dressed young man she observed putting handfuls of razor blade packages into his shorts pockets and walking around to steal elsewhere in the store. She didn’t want to approach him since “you never know who is carrying a gun.” And he walked out of the store with his stolen goods. She also said that they spend at least an hour each shift putting things back where they belong – the Walgreen’s equivalent of my lady with the cheese or the fresh beef item left on some frozen food.

This doesn’t even scratch the surface of things like drivers in shopping center parking lots. But that’s a whole different rant.

Intuit Shun - Part Two

Over the last several days, I have received notice after notice about sending the underwriters information on our pending Intuit GoPayment account, some of which we’ve sent up to four times. This morning, I received a notice that asked: “Please provide copies of your last three months merchant PROCESSING statements from your current or previous processor.” Since I have zero idea what they are asking for now, I called their 800 number.

Fortunately, this time I got a wonderful representative. Reminded me of a caring grandmother. She looked through the piles of notices they’d sent me, notes they’d put on our pending account, the emails and attachments I’d sent them, etc.

In our conversation over the next several minutes, she told me that all this searching on their end was to protect them against fraudulent organizations, especially non-profits. If a scammer puts in a charge from someone (perhaps a card that has been compromised), the credit card processing company (where these underwriters work) would have to pay the charge back to the cardholder. Thus, they are trying to avoid losses on their part. And that’s why they need all the documentation to see if an applicant is on the up and up.

The good news for us is that she looked over all our paperwork, saw some errors the sales department had put in our application that raised some red flags on their part, told me to ignore the latest notice from them, said we are approved and that I should receive an email confirming this later today.

Nice to get someone who gets down to what needs to be done and does it. Now the next test is when it does get approved to see if our new handy-dandy Mophie scanner works on my iPhone. She also talks to her computer, but never yells at it since she wants it to be her friend.

Intuit Shun

This rant really isn’t about Intuit, but, rather, the bank that they partner with for one of their services. We’re exploring using a credit card scanner connected to an iPhone. Finding the hardware from Mophie was easy. Setting up the account with Intuit was hard.

The nice customer service agent I spoke with who answered some questions I had about the service told me it was faster for him to take all the information they’d need on the telephone rather than my doing our registration online. Hmmmm. It took 20 minutes over the phone and there were several times I had to ask the young man to really slow down when he talked. While I can blame part of the problem on my hearing, he was talking REALLY fast. He’s obligated to tell me 100 percent of his script, so there was lots to listen about.

After this all was done, I received an email from the underwriters at the bank/processing house they use for credit card collection. Remember, all I am trying to do is to set up a link so that when the organization I work with scans a credit card for, say, a donation, it will be recorded and we will be paid into our own bank account. In this day and age, though, they want to make sure we aren’t some fly-by-night organization or a scammer. Okay. I can live with that.

First they asked for proof we are a non-profit organization. We called them and were told what email address to send such proof. We did that twice. Unfortunately, the email address we were told was not the correct one for the underwriters, so we kept getting emails from them that they still hadn’t seen our proof.

Then they wanted copies of several months of our bank statements. I downloaded same from our banks’ sites and sent them a PDF file of the downloads. I got an email saying that they could not accept what I had sent. I talked to someone in the underwriting department who told me they don’t accept copies of downloaded bank statements. They are worried that somehow they could be altered. Hmmmm again. Seems to me, as I told her, I could take a paper bank statement and alter it, scan it, and send it, and no one would be the wiser. If they didn’t want the actual paper statements sent to them, any electronic transmission could have faked stuff in it. So, we’re getting together scans of our bank statements over several months to send to them.

We’re not borrowing money from them. We only want to scan and deposit credit card receipts through them. They don’t even go into their bank, but ours. “I am not a crook.” Oh, perhaps I shouldn’t have said it that way.