Google is introducing a new feature this summer that will make it much easier for people to remove “revenge porn” of themselves from the Google search results.
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.
Google does make it clear they are not removing the images from the websites themselves, but they are instead making it difficult for anyone to find those webpages that contain the content.
Previously, people were either seeking out services of reputation management companies to try and remove these type of results, which could be expensive, or attempting to navigate the DMCA process to see them removed. With the introduction of a form a victim can submit, it will make it much easier for victims to see these results removed from Google.
Google says they will be adding a form for revenge porn removal in the next few weeks. When it is available, Google will add the link to this blog post.
While Google is tackling this head on, it isn’t known if Bing plans to make something available to users wanting to see this type of content removed from their search results too. While they do have a significantly smaller search share, I imagine Bing wouldn’t want to gain a reputation for being the place to search for this type of content… especially with their previous reputation for being the porn search engine of choice.
This is a great move for Google and will definitely help victims wanting to move forward after a vindictive person has spread explicit images without permission.
Jennifer Slegg
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