This began with what looked like simply a case of the United Arab Emirates getting a little asine over our ‘ass’.

One of our users recently attempted to read the review on TrustedPlaces of a Korean restaurant called Assa, but found the page blocked by his ISP, Etisalat. Figuring this was simply the word ‘ass’ being blocked by a crude filter he dropped an email to Etisalat asking for us to be unblocked.

It seems that it wasn’t simply our ass that was being objected to.

He forwarded the reply that he received on to us and this is the interesting part:

Thank you for contacting us, we are extremely sorry for the fact that the site you have requested can not be unblocked. Reason : Dating and Relationships. Website.

Well, hard to argue against the ‘Website.’ part.

Dating and relationships though…we do encourage you to to go out a lot AND we do love the fact that our tastematcher allows you to find other users with similar interests, but that’s where we discreetly leave the rest of the evening to you

We’d love to hear back from anyone who has found themselves in a relationship because of TrustedPlaces, but right now all we can say to Dubai is that our main objective here is to easily allow people to share knowledge and benefit from one another. This means we’re greatly opposed to any kind of filtering and blocking process and while we initially found this amusing it’s also incredibly frustrating.

If any other users have had similar problems we’d really like to hear from you.

Photo credit: Potential Denied by Clearly Ambiguous (CC license) - also a comment on censorship in the UAE