[284] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Microsoft HealthVault and Porn
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (privacy@vortex.com)
Tue Oct 9 12:49:22 2007
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Date: Tue, 09 Oct 2007 09:26:26 -0700
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Microsoft HealthVault and Porn
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000312.html
Greetings. It looks like Microsoft may already have some
significant quality problems with their heavily hyped HealthVault.
I received an e-mail last night from a reader who was disgusted to
find that some completely valid queries to the HealthVault search
engine -- mentioning bodily parts or bodily functions -- returned
extremely high percentages (sometimes almost 100%) of porn keyword
"sucker" pages (porn pages that have been "seeded" with all manner
of likely keywords). I won't offer example search strings here in
the interests of good taste, but I've confirmed this situation
myself.
In fact, this person noted getting masses of porn results starting
with their very first HealthVault search. They were stunned that
Microsoft's quality control and presumed filtering of results for
health relevance were so defective on a highly touted
health-specific search engine deployed for the general public.
I agree.
For comparison purposes, a test of the same searches on Google also
yielded a lot of porn hits, but overall more relevant hits were
returned, and Google isn't promoting their main search engine as
having a health focus.
There is a potential bright side to this situation. I'm all in
favor of using encryption whenever possible on the Net, and
HealthVault uses SSL crypto for searches in both directions. So
finally there's a way to search for porn on the Net with better
privacy!
All Microsoft needs to do now is simply rebrand their service as
"PornVault" -- now that's a winner.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com or lauren@pfir.org
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
http://www.pfir.org/lauren
Co-Founder, PFIR
- People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org
Founder, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
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