On Friday, Amit Singhal, the head of Google Search (we know him as the boss of Matt Cutts back in the day), wrote on the Google blog on policy that Google will enable people to fill out a form and request removal of what is called "revenge porn."
Revenge porn is when people post images of you in a private and intimate setting that is aimed at embarrassing you and taking revenge. Amit explains that revenge porn is when "an ex-partner seeking to publicly humiliate a person by posting private images of them, or hackers stealing and distributing images from victims’ accounts." He added that "some images even end up on “sextortion” sites that force people to pay to have their images removed."
Google will add a new form in the coming weeks to enable users to remove these images from Google's search index. Amit knows "this won’t solve the problem of revenge porn" but it will help.
Google already honors such requests to remove social security numbers, bank information, signatures and other potentially harmful content that can be indexed on people.
Here is more:
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.
Forum discussion at Google+.
Image credit to ShutterStock for shocked elderly people.
