Bing Denies Wrongdoing in Sogou Privacy Leak Mess

Microsoft’s Bing China denied responsibility yesterday for a data leak in Sogou’s mobile input method that Sogou says is ultimately the fault of Bing and other search engines. “Bing search has not violated the robots.txt agreement,” the company said in a statement.

The madness started earlier this week, when security firm Wu Yun pointed out on Weibo that a new feature of Sogou’s input method software on mobile devices was, ahem, exposing Sogou users publicly. The feature allows users to upload photos and other multimedia to Sogou servers for sharing, but these uploads aren’t necessarily meant to be public. Unfortunately, Wu Yun discovered that they are all searchable via some search engines, including Bing, and users have since dug up some pretty embarrassing photos (including the ones pictured above, edited for nudity/privacy).

Sogou has responded that the problem is search engines violating the robots.txt agreement. Robots.txt is a file that allows websites to disable search engines and other bots from crawling and indexing their sites. For example, in pinyin.cn’s robots.txt file — that’s the server the images from Sogou mobile input are uploaded to — all bots except for a single Google bot are blocked from using the site.

It’s not clear how Bing or other search engines could be indexing the images if they’re not ignoring Sogou’s robots.txt file, but it’s worth noting that the robots.txt convention is just a general agreement, not an actual law. And it isn’t unprecedented for companies to ignore the blocks listed in a robots.txt file; for example, Qihoo 360‘s spiders were set to ignore Baidu’s robots.txt file in a dispute that led to a major lawsuit earlier this year (a Qihoo rep told us that the company respects robots.txt so long as it isn’t being “abused” by competitors).

But whether or not Bing is adhering to Sogou’s robots.txt file is probably of little concern to the people whose, um, data has already been found and shared by the public. Especially that guy on the left, who’s been getting a little stick from China’s netizens for having, ahem, a little stick. And while any search engine ignoring robots.txt is being obnoxious, it’s hard to argue that the ultimate blame doesn’t lie with Sogou here. Users put their trust and their nudie pics in the company’s hands, and it failed to protect them sufficiently.