Google Search Results: Search Engine Wants to Help Revenge Porn Victims Remove Explicit Images From Search Results
Google wants to help revenge porn victims remove unauthorized images from the search engine, the company announced Friday. These images are usually explicit and posted as a punishment by a former significant other, according to Rolling Stone.
"Our philosophy has always been that Search should reflect the whole web. But revenge-porn images are intensely personal and emotionally damaging, and serve only to degrade the victims-predominantly women," wrote Amit Singhal, the senior vice president of Google Search, on the company's public policy blog.
"So going forward, we'll honor requests from people to remove nude or sexually explicit images shared without their consent from Google Search results," Singhal added.
This is a rare decision by Google to censor content on the Internet from its search engine. Google has decided to push forward with helping victims get these images taken down because of the stories they have heard.
"We've heard many troubling stories of 'revenge-porn': an ex-partner seeking to publicly humiliate a person by posting private images of them, or hackers stealing and distributing images from victims' accounts. Some images even end up on 'sextortion' sites that force people to pay to have their images removed," Singhal wrote.
Singhal said that Google would soon put up a website that revenge porn victims will be able to visit to fill out a request to get the image removed from the search results.
"We know this won't solve the problem of revenge porn -- we aren't able, of course, to remove these images from the websites themselves -- but we hope that honoring people's requests to remove such imagery from our search results can help," Singhal wrote.
Four months ago, a former revenge porn website operator, Craig Brittain, demanded that Google remove all the links about the case against him. Brittain operated the website IsAnybodyDown.com and was trying to clean up his past.
There is a proposed federal law dealing with revenge porn that would ban these images on the Internet.
"Today it's possible to ruin someone's life with the click of a button, by publishing another person's private images without their consent. Our laws haven't yet caught up with this crime," California congresswoman Jackie Speier told Gizmodo in February.
Speier said wealthy celebrities with lawyers are able to get these types of images taken down, but average people are unable to do so. She said publishing medical or financial records is already punishable by law, and unauthorized nude pictures should be as well.
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