Google on Friday said it would soon begin removing nude or sexually explicit images of people shared without their contest – revenge porn – from its search results.
Senior Vice President of Google Search, Amit Singhal, said Google’s philosophy has always been that search should reflect the whole web. But revenge porn images are intensely personal, emotionally damaging and only serve to degrade the victims – most of which are women.
Singhal acknowledged that this won’t solve the problem of revenge porn, largely because they aren’t able to remove offending images from third-party websites. They hope, however, that honoring takedown requests will at least help a bit.
It’s worth mentioning that this will be a narrow and limited policy, similar to how the search giant treats removal requests for other highly sensitive information like bank account numbers and signatures that somehow find their way to the web.
Lawmakers and site operators alike have really started to crack down on revenge porn over the past couple of years. Late last year, a Los Angeles man became the first to be convicted under a new California law that prohibits such behavior.
A San Diego man was convicted in February of operating a revenge porn website and was eventually sentenced to 18 years behind bars. And following last year’s celebrity iCloud hack, Reddit implemented a revised policy that prohibits the posting of nude or suggestive images without consent of the person in the image.
https://www.techspot.com/news/61051-google-soon-begin-accepting-requests-remove-revenge-porn.html
