Google has announced a new policy regarding revenge porn:
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.
While I applaud Google’s incredibly belated effort to do something about a longstanding problem and agree with its baseline policy that search should cover the whole Web, this is the least proactive way of addressing the problem one can imagine. Having a way to easily contact Google to get known images removed is a start. But why not, instead of removing offending images from search one-by-one, ban entire sites that primarily traffic in this practice?
I’m not advocating removing, say, Reddit from the search results. But Google could certainly remove specific subreddits that traffic in revenge porn. And there are whole sites out there that are nothing but purported images and videos of ex-wives and ex-girlfriends. Once discovered, why not simply remove them from search results?
