Bitly: Protecting users from malicious links with Web Risk

Bitly has partnered with Google Web Risk to enhance its trust and safety program, protecting users from online threats such as phishing, malware, and child sexual abuse materials. Bitly generates millions of links and QR codes daily, and this partnership allows the company to evaluate linked URLs in real-time against Google's database of unsafe web resources. The partnership brings several key features to customers, including automatic checking of links and QR codes for abusive content, high-fidelity confidence scoring, and actionable insights on common types of abusive content. Google Web Risk's confidence scoring helps organizations evaluate the maliciousness level of a URL, ranking them as low to extremely high risk. Bitly has fine-tuned its threshold to minimize false positives, maintaining a remarkably low rate given the scale of links and QR codes generated daily. The company's trust and safety principles involve a three-pronged approach, including proprietary technology, user support, and partnerships with technology experts and NGOs. Bitly's partnership with Google Web Risk is a key part of this effort, and the company plans to leverage more Google resources, such as reCAPTCHA, to enhance its capabilities. As Bitly's product offerings grow, the complexity of the threat landscape faced by the company's Trust and Safety team also increases, but Google's suite of solutions can provide the necessary tools to address evolving needs. Bitly's goal is to keep users safe and earn their trust by leveraging Google Web Risk's enterprise security service to validate the safety of generated links and QR codes in real-time. The company continues to evolve its security stack to protect its users, adopting cutting-edge technology to safeguard them effectively.