‘Bing’ is seriously pissing me off.
So, this is a photo of my daughter after eating a s’more:
It was posted in May of ‘08 for a Wordless Wednesday submission. The premise of the post was a before/after shot of her making a big ol mess with a s’more. The tags on the Flickr set and photo were: smores, sweetp, marshmallow, graduation, tennessee, trip, travel, and family. Pretty innocent, no?
Many moons later, Bing launched, and I started noticing disturbing search terms leading to my blog from the Bing search engine. For example:
Look at numbers 21 and 34. As #30 says, what the fuck?
Upon clicking on these referrers to see what exactly was on my site that kept popping up in sick searches like that, I find this:
Third row, last on right.
And that’s not all. The terms actually got worse:
Top row, last on right.
Third row, next to last.
So, I obviously was furious, and I shot off a complaint to Bing, explaining the problem and asking how this happened and how we could stop it and prevent it from happening again.
It’s been about a month. I’ve had no response at all.
I know some will say that is the risk you take when you put your child’s image on the internet. Perhaps that is right. It is certainly possible for some freak to troll Flickr for children’s images. But for an innocently tagged child’s photo to turn up on searches like that, something must have happened along the line that could be stopped. I know that I never had this happen before Bing, so something in Bing’s algorithm is why this is happening, as far as I can tell. The photos in the search results lead to my site, so the photo wasn’t harvested and renamed or tagged and put up somewhere else.
Maybe you guys can help me get Bing’s attention and a solution, before someone else’s child’s image is misused for the benefit of sexual predators.
Update 8/11/09 8:49PM: Having heard from Betsy here in the comment section, I have been able to send her an email with the whole kit and kaboodle of what happened. I will definitely let you all know what the resoution is when we reach it, as well as continuing to respond to each comment individually.
Please know how thankful I am for each and every one of you who took the time to comment, tweet, or even just read and educate yourself on how to know where your traffic is coming from. Without knowing what kind of referrers you have, it’s difficult to make an educated decision about whether to post photos publicly or not. I learned again today what a community can do, and I am awed by the power of a group who isn’t afraid to take action.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has”. ~Margaret Mead~
Update 8/12/09 2:26PM: Betsy has had Bing take technical steps to remove Emily’s photo from the search terms involved, and the engineers at Bing are looking into making whatever changes need to happen to keep this from happening again. She said it appears that the association was made due to a post I made about a month later about protecting children from sexual abuse and what to do if it’s suspected.
After thanking Betsy for her efforts, I asked for an explanation of how Bing works so we can all protect our content from being mislabeled in this way, and offered to pass it on to you all. I think it’s something we all should know, because it appears that otherwise, any time we write about stopping social ills such as abuse, terrorism, domestic violence, etc., we are at risk of having any photo from that page displayed for terms associated with the negative things we write against.
I’m so sorry you’re having to do this. Have you considered a EECB (Executive Email Carpet Bomb… They can be quite effective sometimes – here’s a link with more details: http://consumerist.com/consumer/complaint-letters/how-to-launch-an-executive-email-carpet-bomb-259713.php
I’ve also passed this on to my husband as he has some contacts within Microsoft that he will contact to see if we can get the names/numbers of Bing higher ups for you.
(Hugs)
PrincessJenn´s last blog ..Badgers
I am so pleased that Bing has responded here in the comments and I really hope you share what was done.
katie ~ motherbumper´s last blog ..It’s Monday and I’m Bejeweled
Pamela;
It looks like we may be getting to the bottom of it now!
Thank you for both your comments, MommyGeekology; Bing has responded here and I have sent off an email-hopefully it’ll work out!
Thanks, ZDub-I hope things are on the way to being worked out!
I can understand that question, Quin. I know its possible for the wrong kind of person to peruse any of our photos that are posted. The risk that a random predator could stumble upon my site is something I understand, and to me, that risk is the same as a random predator seeing my child at the grocery store or a restaurant with me. It’s a horrible thing to have to accept, but I don’t think that hiding away in my house is a reasonable response to that risk.
However, having say, our local newspaper publish an article about pedophile targets along with my home address and a description of my children would be completely messed up and that is, to me, akin to what has happened here.
Mr Farty, If you figure it out, please let me know so I can link or post it here…I’m sure lots of bloggers want to know how to do it, as well!
Betsy-I’ve emailed you and sent out notice on twitter as well as updating this post with your willingness to help. Thank you very much!
Thank you Jenn-I am hoping since Betsy has been in contact that a resolution will be forthcoming!
Me too, Katie! Thanks so much for your part in this, and I will definitely share!
Holy fuckshits. My blood ran cold at those search terms. I really hope they get it straightened out.
Jenni´s last blog ..Penny School Supplies
Never used bing. Did not consider trying it. Now I think this kind of search foolishness (keeping post G rated); you get my point. This is too disturbing for me to pass on. OK bing what are you — search tool or censor app without common sense?
Saw this from a link from a friend’s Twitter page. That’s absolutely horrible and doesn’t even make any sense why your daughter’s pic would be up. Now I’m a little nervous about the pics I have of my cousins and the little girl I babysit occasionally. They’re on my MySpace and Facebook pages but who knows if they can be made public. Thank you for opening our eyes to this and good luck with getting your daughter’s pic kept private.
That’s distrubing – and disgusting! It also demonstrates that Bing as a meta search engine isn’t all they say it’s supposed to be.
Condo Blues´s last blog ..Wine Box Wall Treatment
So far, so good-they have taken technical steps, and I’m hoping to be able to pass on info to help us all protect our content.
fairuse-I don’t really understand the premise of how it is different than other engines..hopefully I will get a better understanding.
Thank you-it’s always a risk, but there must be something different about how Bing works, because this hasn’t happened with Google or Yahoo. Hopefully they’ll explain how Bing works so we can protect ourselves.
Condo Blues-it appears that photos are associated with other words on the page. What is troubling about that is that for bloggers, a page can contain lots of different topics and posts. in this case, I posted about the smore’s in May, and in June I posted about protecting kids from sexual abuse. I have ten posts/page, so the only way they could have appeared on the same page is in the category view that contains them both, and only if subsequent posts hadn’t changed the display so they were on different posts. A lot of ifs, but it was enough to replace the innocent terms associated with the actual photo with other terms found in another post.
a picture of 3 of my kids turned up in a BING pornographic search today, I was completely horrified. Someone sclicked on the picture of my kids while looking for
heather’s ass -locklear -graham -mills -ideepthroat
*shudder* this was not a good intro to Bing. What steps do i need to take to get this removed?
fidget´s last blog ..Baby Names: beating a dead horse
For what it’s worth:
http://help.live.com/help.aspx?project=wl_webmasters&market=en-us&querytype=topic&query=wl_webmasters_conc_restrictaccesstosite.htm
No use to me, since I use Blogger, but if you have access to your website’s root server, you can indeed block Bing’s MSNBot web crawler.
Mr Farty´s last blog ..Twitterfail
Good Lord, Fidget. I hope you get some answers, too; hopefully Betsy will be able to help you, too!
Awesome, thanks-I’ll see what I can do! Mr Farty doesn’t stink!
[...] have kids and have ever posted a pic of them n your blog or on Flickr, you should really read this brief but completely infuriating post and then tweet about it because…well, because I said so. And because it’s important. [...]
Uh, that is really sick. Of course I just got through posting some photos of the kiddies on my blog. Great. I often wonder if we should EVER share photos on the internet that aren’t set to private. So many sick people out there.
Mold on the Wonder Bread´s last blog ..County Fair on a Summer Night