The Pirate Bay news, rumors: Google's Safe Browsing update could seal fate of torrent site
The Pirate Bay has dodged for years the attempts of rights holders to shut it down for years, but it looks like copyright infringement will not be the cause of its downfall, should that day come.
As part of Google's latest update on its safe browsing service, The Pirate Bay could be banned for 30 days on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari when it is repeatedly flagged as a malicious site.
According to Torrent Freak, The Pirate Bay has been tagged as a harmful site by Google twice just in the recent weeks.
This means that Google will warn users before they visit the site of the harmful and malicious content it may contain. In TPB's case, it will mostly be the advertisements plastered all over the site.
This is not something new for TPB and its users as the torrent giant was also marked as a phishing site for several times in its history. With Google's "repeat offender" policy, The Pirate Bay will be banned should it be tagged as a harmful website frequently (although the timeframe for such classification was not detailed).
There will be no warnings as the ones stated above, but the company will immediately take the site down. The Pirate Bay is, of course, just one of the torrent sites facing such risk.
"Over time, we've observed that a small number of websites will cease harming users for long enough to have the warnings removed, and will then revert to harmful activity," Google's Safe Browsing Team wrote on its blog.
"Safe Browsing will begin to classify these types of sites as 'Repeat Offenders.' Repeat Offenders are websites that repeatedly switch between compliant and policy-violating behavior for the purpose of having a successful review and having warnings removed," the team explained.
The team behind The Pirate Bay is not worried about the site getting banned or being a "repeat offender" as they don't think TPB is one.
"It's infrequent enough. I don't believe TPB will be flagged as a Repeat Offender. Ultimately, that will cost the ad agencies dearly if all their clients were permanently denied visitors," administrator plc365 told Torrent Freak.
