Kmart bans customers using religious words such as ‘Jesus’ or ‘church’ at its photo printing kiosks – but ‘Islam’ and ‘Koran’ get the all-clear
- Words such as Jesus, church and bible were replaced with asterisks in captions
- This is because new software wrongly thinks the words are profanities
- It was not just religious words affected, with the word Canadian also banned
- Kmart said it was an error and would be fixed with a software update
Kmart photo printing kiosks banned some words relating to religion due to a software error.
Words such as Jesus, church and bible used in captions were deemed to be profanities and replaced with asterisks.
The words Jewish and Allah were also banned but mosque, Islam and koran were not.
Kmart photo printing kiosks (pictured) banned some words relating to religion due to a software error
It was not just religious words affected by the error, with the word Canadian also banned, reported the Daily Telegraph.
When customers tried to caption photos with the forbidden words, a message came up on screen saying ‘profanity has been detected in text and substituted with ****’.
The kiosks are run by Kodak which recently installed software to detect profanities.
Kodak sales and marketing manager Gavin Wulfsohn said the list of profanities was wrong and would be fixed.
A spokesman for the Kmart said: ‘This is a system error and it will be updated overnight. It in no way reflects our views as a business.
‘At Kmart, we support diversity and inclusiveness irrespective of race, religion, age, gender, ethnicity, ability, appearance or attitude and we want our teams and stores to reflect the communities in which we operate.’
A spokesman for the company said it was a system error and would be fixed. Pictured: A Sydney Kmart