REDMOND, WA — Internet safety experts are warning parents that Bing.com, Microsoft’s attempt to compete head-to-head with search-engine titan Google, may give children — and unwilling adult users — more information than they bargained for.Bing went live in the U.S. during the last weekend in May, and almost immediately bloggers and conservative pundits began calling the new search engine the next step in the evolution of pornographic tube sites. One of Bing’s most-touted features is a video search feature that allows users to “autoplay” videos simply by hovering a mouse over them. That, according to the nanny crowd at Fox News, may be enough reason to shun the search engine.
“[The] asset may become a liability, because users can get a taste of porn videos on Bing instead of having to go to a smutty website,” a FoxNews.com report stated.
Although Bing offers built-in filters rated “strict,” “moderate” or “off,” child-protection advocates already are warning the effort will do little to prevent minors from accessing hardcore porn.
“It’s a no-brainer for any kid [to set Bing’s filters to ‘off’],” Enough is Enough President and Chairwoman Donna Rice Hughes told Fox. “From the standpoint of the new state-of-the-art search engine, [the video preview] is a really neat thing, of course. The flipside of that is that you’ve got an abundance of pornography out there.”
Of course, filtering software manufacturers immediately leapt to the defense of innocence. By Monday, both CyberPatrol and InternetSafety.com’s SafeEyes incorporated safeguards to block Bing’s autoplay feature.
Hughes, whose organization’s goal is to protect children from online porn, said auxiliary software, while helpful, is not enough. Microsoft must make Bing’s filtering capabilities “much more prominent and have an option for password protection” so children cannot circumvent parental settings, she said.
So far, Microsoft has balked at that notion.
“By default, Bing filters out explicit image and video results,” a post on the software giant’s blog noted. “Consumers must take action to turn off the Safe Search filter in their settings in order for explicit image or video content to appear in Bing’s results.”
Child health experts indicated porn on the internet is a fact of modern life, and parents need to be dedicated to their offspring’s wellbeing instead of expecting everyone else to “protect the children.”
“Kids can access pornography on the Internet no matter what the search engine is,” National Institute on Media President Dr. David Walsh told FoxNews.com. “I don’t know that search engines can be programmed to do the job that parents need to.”
