A new Microsoft effort prevents revenge porn from affecting potential victims.
Microsoft is now jumping on the bandwagon behind other search engines such as Google to obfuscate links to revenge porn, the illicit and violating act of posting pornographic material without the approval of those depicted, Mashable reports. As intended, the blowback is less than savory for victims.
Microsoft is targeting its Bing search engine for garbage removal as well as the Xbox Live gaming network and OneDrive, its associated cloud service Microsoft released in a statement.
The combined services account for 87.7% of the United State’s search engine market, giving potential victims more defense against avengers. But one major caveat is that neither search engine can target revenge porn without first having the victims discover the violation. Once they do, both Google and Microsoft provide a contact site, in which the link is then obliterated.
But the content still exists in digital space, only the link severed. Yet, the intention of preventing the subject matter from being viewed is achieved.
Even governments are tracking the effort. For instance, in February, the state of California slapped the ring leader of a revenge porn site with 27 felony counts with extortion and identity theft tacked on.