For those with young children, it can be worrisome when you’re trying to figure out if the internet is safe for your children. After all typing a query into a search bar can yield results of all manner, including unsavory ones. The good news is that if you don’t have parental monitoring tools installed on your computer, Microsoft is already doing something about it with Bing.
The company has recently announced that Bing will be the first search engine to adopt a new web safety standard which is known as “safe preference”. Basically what this means is that websites and search engines will only display results which are deemed to be safe based on the safety preference set by the user.
According to Microsoft, “We realize that controlling your children’s safety settings can be challenging. With so many devices, browsers and search engines, you usually have to go to multiple pages to turn on safe search on their behalf. The safe preference method is designed to make controls easier and more consistent for parents. It offers one standardized way for users to communicate their safe preferences to websites and online services.”
To enable this feature, parents will need to turn on Windows Family Safety for their child’s account and compatible browsers will recognize it. As it stands only Internet Explorer 10+ and Firefox are the ones that support safe preference, so if you want to take advantage of it, you will need to use either of these two browsers.
So parents, what do you guys think of this move by Microsoft? Do you think it will help protect your child from the unsavory content of the internet, or do you think that kids these days are a bit too tech savvy and will find a way around it?
Filed in . Read more about Bing (Microsoft) and Microsoft.