Search engines, messaging services, and social networks that are all threatened by this should forego their competitive instincts and share information about how to combat this issue. If Google doesn’t have this issue but Bing and DuckDuckGo do, I’d feel morally bound as Google to share best practices to help them prevent indexing, suggesting, and retrieving this content.
Microsoft also shares a lot of stuff with the industry, including PhotoDNA hashes of known CP images. Just because it is not publicly discussed doesn't mean there isn't a lot of work going on, even between organizations, to work on this problem.
There's a reason this was shared with TechCrunch before it was shared with Microsoft.
Do we know Google didn't also have this issue? Or did they have it, patch it, and then make the press aware. Look back at Facebook's PR groups spamming TechCrunch with "tips" and hoping to seed negative articles about their adversaries. This whole thing, while a very valid problem that needs to be addressed immediately- reads exactly like some PR group dropping tips on a client's competitors to TechCrunch.
Forgive me if I'm skeptical of the motives of someone who cares more about the press finding out first that Bing is leaking potential child porn, over actually removing access to child porn.
I don’t think this needs to be a conspiracy. Bing is far behind. I worked on a suicide awareness project when I was at Quora, and at least at the time Google had help links featured for suicide subjects and Bing had instructions on how to kill yourself. Arguably Bing had the better search results but not the high ground. This could be another one of those cases.
Bing is totally behind, agreed. I probably shouldn't have included the part that maybe Google had the issue and fixed it because I actually don't believe that, and it detracts from the point. I totally agree Google has the absolute high ground here. Which, I won't lie, made me suspicious; particularly with Microsoft doing well in the press recently and Google, well, not.
I'm biased because I generally like Microsoft better than Google, but this whole thing begs the question: why was this directed to the media before Microsoft? Both could've been made aware. Plenty of disclosure-like articles are written with the claim "at press time, the <problem> is no longer showing" and they're no less impactful. With child pornography, of all things, why the hell is Tech Crunch pushing this story so quickly that they had to issue a warning to not look up the links because you could be liable? Like, Microsoft is going to be rightfully shamed either way, ya really need to maximize the shock value with that extra bit? At the cost of leaving active child pornography in the open. Come on.
>>I worked on a suicide awareness project when I was at Quora, and at least at the time Google had help links featured for suicide subjects and Bing had instructions on how to kill yourself. Arguably Bing had the better search results but not the high ground.
This is not being behind, it's showing what the user wants. BING should have banners or ads on suicide prevention, that's all. If you want to kill yourself, a suicide prevention page is not the most relevant one.
This story is to give a black eye to MSFT, they could have just told them instead of doing studies, but that doesn't bring clicks to their site. A lot of times competitors are behind such stories. Not necessarily google, it could be a vendor hoping that MS hires them.
It’s definitely being behind. Helping your users die will affect your ability to profit from them in the future, it also costs almost nothing to show a suicide prevention banner with a help line, and they are known to help prevent suicide.
That said, I’m not at all arguing that a competitor or vendor wasn’t the reason for this article.
I'm not saying that this is right, but the reality is that Microsoft's failure here drives more people to Google, so there is actually a lot of capitalist incentive to allow Bing to fail at this.
Morally, we should all strive to minimize this kind of thing - but from a business perspective, this story will absolutely earn Google business and capital.
Excessive filtering (threshold set to take no chances) has started to make people seek Google alternatives. The easiest way for Google to respond to this threat is to push stories that will pressure the competition into damaging results with excessive filtering.
