Bing leads adoption of safe preference for child safety

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At Bing, we’re committed to making search better and safer for kids. Bing is the first major search engine to support a proposed new web safety standard known as safe preference. Websites and services that adopt this method only display content they have classified as safe when participating browsers communicate the user’s safe preference to them.

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.


Here’s how it works with Bing:

• Parents need to turn on Windows Family Safety for their child’s account.
• Participating browsers recognize that parental control is turned on and indicate to Bing that the user prefers to receive safer results.
• Bing respects this preference and sends back only results we’ve classified as non-adult.

The safe preference method is currently supported by Internet Explorer (10+) and Firefox. Using a browser that supports safe preference will help Bing deliver filtered results consistently. Once parental controls are enabled, here’s the message kids using supported browsers see in their settings page:




The safety setting becomes more effective for parents and children as more websites and browsers adopt the safe preference method. We hope that more browsers, websites and services will embrace this method in the near future to help make controls simpler and more reliable, so that we collectively help build a safer web for our children.

For more information about the “safe” HTTP Preference, you can refer to the Internet draft specification submitted to the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) standards track committee.

– The Bing Team

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