Microsoft Bing Search Engine Still Serving Up Child Porn: Report

Microsoft's search engine Bing is still serving child porn, according to an online safety startup, which said certain search terms on the platform brought up child porn images and related keywords. This is not the first time Bing has been spotted serving up the illegal content, with a report from January this year highlighting the issue.

"Microsoft's Bing search engine reportedly still served up child porn, nearly a year after the tech giant said it was addressing the issue. The news comes as part of a report in The New York Times that looks at what the newspaper says is a failure by tech companies to adequately address child pornography on their platforms," CNET reported on Saturday.

The tech giant has long been at the forefront of combating abuse imagery, even creating a detection tool called "PhotoDNA" almost a decade ago. But many criminals have turned to its search engine Bing as a reliable tool. "Part of the issue is privacy, some companies say," said CNET's report.

As we mentioned, this is not the first time that Microsoft's Bing search engine has been caught serving child porn to its users. To recall, earlier this year, Bing was caught serving images portraying child pornography in search results and even suggested keywords that could be used to find more disturbing content whose possession or distribution is deemed a criminal offence.

The January findings were reported by AntiToxin, an organisation which builds solutions to combat online abuse, after an anonymous tip received by TechCrunch highlighted how easy it was to find such images - which are banned across multiple platforms - on Bing. As per the report, Bing not only brings results for keywords as simple as ‘porn kids' in the image search, but it also provided auto-complete search suggestions which again brings up a plethora of content depicting underage individuals in scenarios that raise alarms. All such photos came up in Bing's image search section when the ‘Safe Search' filter is turned off.