Tech Sites Including Microsoft’s Bing Criticized Over Child Pornography Policies

“Microsoft’s Bing search engine reportedly still served up child porn, nearly a year after the tech giant said it was addressing the issue,” reports CNET: The news comes as part of a Saturday 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…. [A] former Microsoft executive told the Times that it now looks as if the company is failing to use its own tools. The Times’ Saturday report notes that 10 years ago, Microsoft helped create software called PhotoDNA that “can use computers to recognize photos, even altered ones, and compare them against databases of known illegal images.” But, the Times said, Bing and other search engines that use Bing’s results are serving up imagery that doesn’t pass muster with PhotoDNA…. The Bing news is part of a larger story from the Times about how various tech companies are dealing with child porn on their platforms. The Times criticizes a tech industry which they say is looking the other way: Amazon, whose cloud storage services handle millions of uploads and downloads every second, does not even look for the imagery. Apple does not scan its cloud storage, according to federal authorities, and encrypts its messaging app, making detection virtually impossible. Dropbox, Google and Microsoft’s consumer products scan for illegal images, but only when someone shares them, not when they are uploaded. And other companies, including Snapchat and Yahoo, look for photos but not videos, even though illicit video content has been exploding for years. (When asked about its video scanning, a Dropbox spokeswoman in July said it was not a “top priority.” On Thursday, the company said it had begun scanning some videos last month.) The largest social network in the world, Facebook, thoroughly scans its platforms, accounting for over 90 percent of the imagery flagged by tech companies last year, but the company is not using all available databases to detect the material. And Facebook has announced that the main source of the imagery, Facebook Messenger, will eventually be encrypted, vastly limiting detection.