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Microsoft Bing makes porn content more accessible

Jun 4, 2009 09:29

The tech world is on the edge of its seat, eagerly awaiting the results of how people will embrace the latest search engine from Microsoft--Bing. As with every innovation, there will be some features that people may think are more disastrous than advantageous, one of which is the video preview provided by Bing. Particulaly the way it displays a search for videos.

When a user hovers his computer mouse over a video thumbnail, the video immediately plays; an autoplay of sorts.

Not only does Bing play the video automatically, it does not log the site as viewed because, technically, we have not visited the site. We've simply viewed it from the thumbnail view. To some, this is critical since parents won't be able to know if their kids have been viewing lewd material on the Web.

It's true that Bing offers to set the SafeSearch Web filter, but it's so easy to turn off. All it takes is one click.

A Microsoft spokesperson released the following statement:
"By default, Bing filters out explicit image and video results. Consumers must take action to turn off the SafeSearch filter in their settings in order for explicit image or video content to appear in Bing's results.

We think our current search safety settings are solid but at Microsoft we are always working on pushing this stuff farther. We also are listening to customers, and some have told us they want more control and they want it now.

In particular, some folks who manage corporate networks have asked for tools now to enforce SafeSearch settings at the network level. So for right now, we wanted to let people know that you can add "adlt=strict" to the end of a query and no matter what the settings are for that session, it will return results as if SafeSearch was set to strict. The query would look like this: http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=adulttermgoeshere&adlt=strict.

This short-term workaround should work with lots of popular firewall and safety products, as well as for larger, managed network environments. In the next couple of months we will formalize this work so that a broader range of partners, applications and tools can take advantage of this functionality more easily. In addition, we are looking for more ways to give consumers more control to ensure that Bing gives them a great search experience."

To me, technology can do only so much. We can install all sorts of protections and Web filtering software into our own computers, but all our kids needs to do is use their friends' PC or go to Internet cafes and all our filtering efforts are gone. I would advice parents to extend their parenting in the real world to the online world, and that means getting smart about technology.

Teaching our kids the right moral values is the most effective way to prevent them from patronizing Web sites containing pornographic material. They may accidentally access the site, but if it does not interest them it's also a click away for them to close the site.

Who said parenting was easy? It's the toughest job there is out there.

God bless us all!

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