Searching for goods on a shopping website is easy and most of the products are well categorized according to your keyword search. However, a mother of a 12-year-old girl was shocked when her daughter stumbled into a stash of sexually explicit material on well-known shopping portal Amazon.
The mother claimed that her daughter logged on to Amazon in search of ebooks for teenagers and the listing showed her a series of porn ebooks for download. The incident was reported by the BBC which mentions that the girl looked for "free Kindle books for teenagers" and results included titles like ‘Being Bad’ and ‘Bad Babysitter’.
Interestingly, Amazon replied back to the issue mentioning that it was "temporarily miscategorised". The girl, Nicola, who lives in south England, was hunting for a few ebooks for her newly gifted Kindle. In statement to the BBC, Amazon said: "These titles were temporarily miscategorised by our systems and should not have appeared under these search terms. We're fixing the error and have contacted the customer to apologise."
Child safety campaigner John Carr who first blogged about this topic 2 years ago, told the BBC that "You can stop this but it effectively renders your Kindle unusable as you have to stop your children accessing the bookshop. Lots of parents buy their children a Kindle hoping up to open a world of reading. No-one suspects by giving their children a Kindle they're opening up a world of porn."
However, Amazon has a guideline in place which mentions that kids below the age of 18 should not use the website without parental supervision.
Image credits (within body text): BBC
