Home / Channel / Microsoft’s Bing warns against UK child abuse search with popups

Microsoft’s Bing warns against UK child abuse search with popups

Microsoft's Bing may play a distant second fiddle against Google search, but they are the first to introduce a pop up warning for anyone in the UK who are searching for child abuse images. The popup will tell the user that the images are illegal and will then provide details for a counselling service.

David Cameron is working hard to block porn images as well as images detailing child abuse, so Microsoft are being proactive with their own software to block users from accessing the illegal images. Yahoo are also saying that they will consider a similar move soon and as they use Bing technology on their search page it would be easy to implement.

Google, the most popular search engine are not planning to use popup warnings but said they would continue to report problem material and help experts combat the sites.

The Bing pop up warning only applies to searches conducted in the UK. It is triggered when people search for words specifically set on a blacklist system, compiled by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center (Ceop).
Bing introduces child abuse warning

Microsoft announced that the notifications are aimed “to stop those who may be drifting towards trying to find illegal child abuse content on the web via search engines'. A spokesman said “This is in addition to Microsoft's existing and longstanding policy of removing any verified links to illegal content of this sort from Bing as quickly as possible.”

“Microsoft has been, and remains, a strong proponent of proactive action in reasonable and scalable ways by the technology industry in the fight against technology-facilitated child exploitation. We have teams dedicated globally to abuse reporting on our services and the development of new innovations to combat child exploitation more broadly.”

The BING alert falls short of Cameron's proposal which will alert people of the consequences of a criminal conviction for their actions, even losing their job, their family or access to their own children. Cameron said in a briefing “There are some searches which are so abhorrent and where there can be no doubt whatsoever about the sick and malevolent intent of the searcher.”

Kitguru says: The first stage already underway.

Become a Patron!

Check Also

Montech HyperFlow Silent 360 AIO Cooler – UPDATE 16 March 25

As some of you may have seen, this week we published a review of the Montech HyperFlow Silent 360 AIO cooler, both on the KitGuru website and our YouTube channel. In this review we explained that the HyperFlow Silent 360 AIO cooler has some issues in regards to the new AMD mounting system that Montech adopted...

2 comments

  1. Now this is just me talking but I wonder how far exactly you can push this filter before it incorrectly comes up with a blacklisted word…
    What if you want to search for ‘child porn ban news’? Will it know to NOT come up with a pop-up?

  2. The Observant Skeptic

    I wonder how long until they ban “lolita” despite it being both a masterpiece of literature, a complex, a clothing style, a hentai manga theme and a description for underage kids.

We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker.

Thank you for visiting KitGuru. Our news and reviews teams work hard to bring you the latest stories and finest, in-depth analysis.

We want to be as informative as possible – and to help our readers make the best buying decisions. The mechanism we use to run our business and pay some of the best journalists in the world, is advertising.

If you want to support KitGuru, then please add www.kitguru.net to your ad blocking whitelist or disable your adblocking software. It really makes a difference and allows us to continue creating the kind of content you really want to read.

It is important you know that we don’t run pop ups, pop unders, audio ads, code tracking ads or anything else that would interfere with the KitGuru experience. Adblockers can actually block some of our free content, such as galleries!