There are some pretty sick people out there. If you end up doing something that might upsetting one of those people, (i.e. an ex) they might take an old nude photo of you and post it online for the entire world to see without your consent. Luckily, a major step is being taken by Google to help deal with this situation, dubbed “revenge porn.’
Recently, Google has announced that within the coming weeks, they’ll be launching a system that allows people to request nude and explicit images of themselves that have been posted without permission from appearing in Google’s search results. This may not remove the image from the originating website, but at least there’s a bit less chance that the nude will be seen by Google users.
Google wrote of the new policy today in a blog post:
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.
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. So going forward, we’ll honor requests from people to remove nude or sexually explicit images shared without their consent from Google Search results.
This is a narrow and limited policy, similar to how we treat removal requests for other highly sensitive personal information, such as bank account numbers and signatures, that may surface in our search results.
As said before, this move made by Google isn’t going to stop revenge porn itself, but hopefully, it’ll help it from spreading any further than it already would without the help of Google. Since Google is so well used, if the image can’t be found on found on the search engine, the it’ll become largely invisible to the world.