by Amit Singhal, SVP, Google Search
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.
In the coming weeks we’ll put up a web form people can use to submit these requests to us, and we’ll update this blog post with the link.
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.
UPDATE Aug 24, 2016: Find our policy on revenge porn
here.
UPDATE, 7/9/2015: People can use
this webform to submit revenge porn removal requests.
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ReplyDeleteAs a revenge porn victim, this news is life-changing. Finally, I can begin combatting the harsh reality I've faced daily for two years - that my sexual assault and the revenge porn videos of it live online with no remedy to remove them from search results.
ReplyDeleteThis change is going help countless victims and will save lives, thank you.
Hopefully the is the start of the end of the Streisand Effect. So that removal requests (or de-indexing at least) becomes an uneventful thing without publicity so that actually works.
DeleteFinally!
DeleteGlad to see Google has taken interest in addressing this in their search engine.
Progress for all the victims who have been affected by this terrible revenge.
Thank you, Amit! This is wonderful news. It will be the beginning of a healing process for so many revenge porn victims. Please pass on my gratitude to those within Google who made this decision.
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ReplyDeleteWhat are you doing fucking people you don't know well enough to trust they aren't recording you without your knowledge?
ReplyDeleteWhat are you doing fucking people you don't know well enough to trust they aren't recording you without your knowledge?
ReplyDeleteThe fact that something as clearly amazing as this step is, still produces arguments, shows how sad our society has become.
ReplyDeleteThank you for taking a step in the right direction, Google, by doing what you can to end revenge porn.
Wonderful news, thanks!
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ReplyDeleteWe’ve been working to fight revenge porn, through representing clients like Chrissy Chambers against those who post their intimate images without consent, and in campaigning, lobbying and giving speeches in the US and UK trying to make this practice a clear violation of the law, both criminal and civil. We applaud Google for taking this important step. The new policy clearly focuses on the *consent* of the person as the standard, which is better than the one used in many criminal statutes including the new one we worked to pass in Britain. They only punish the perpetrator if he intends to “cause distress” to the person depicted, and don’t offer any way to get the images taken down – leaving no practical recourse for someone whose images are posted after being hacked, or get reposted for “kicks,” or because sites make money spreading them around. Really, a better term than “revenge porn” for describing all of these cruel practices is “non-consensual pornography.” By removing non-consensual pornographic images from its search results as Google has now agreed to do, it will help starve them of the oxygen they need to spread, and steer the internet away from permitting anonymous cowards to make people’s lives a living hell with impunity.
ReplyDeleteIn the long run, we’d like to see the default position of internet hosts switch so that affirmative proof that the sex depicted is consensual (like a brief video clip of the people depicted stating they want to be in it, and showing their ID) is required before sexually explicit images get posted. (There’s already a default position against child porn, which all responsible internet companies readily enforce.) This would allow total freedom of expression for those who want to express themselves with sexual images, and protect victims of non-consensual ones from having to fight to take down images that never should have been posted in the first place (and once images are posted, anyone can copy and download them and they’re never really gone). Meanwhile, our firm, McAllister Olivarius, will continue to fight for victims of non-consensual pornography and campaign to extend the law’s protections so that this practice dies away.
This is a good starting point, but I think we need as a society to more broadly understand that "consent" is not as cut and dry as we would like to believe. We live in a world where the social conditioning to sexualize females is the norm, and young women are expected to perform "sexuality" in order to be accepted in society. The alternative to performing sexuality is to be invisible. These are not options, and you can't consent to something where the alternative is that you aren't welcome to participate in society, or that you will be otherwise punished for failing to comply.
DeleteIf we truly want to end a world where sexual exploitation is the norm, then we have to end the sexualization of women and girls. Women are human beings, and deserve to be seen and treated as human beings.
Please, please extend this policy somehow to the so-called Mug Shot sites. They are also ruining people's lives. The sites remain in your search even when the charges have been dropped or expunged. Please do something.
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ReplyDeleteIt says in the post "In the coming weeks we’ll put up a web form"...
Deletethank you for your kindness
ReplyDeleteThis is clearly the right thing to do. Revenge porn does nothing constructive and only serves to hurt victims.
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What are you doing thinking that every sexual act is consensual?
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