Google Is Starting to Remove Revenge Porn from Search Results

Google is beginning to remove revenge porn from its search results, limiting access to sexually explicit images that were shared without their subject’s consent. In the “coming weeks,” Google will open a web form that will allow people to request the removal of results showing them nude or in sexually explicit situations that they did not agree to have published. It’s an important change to Google’s policy that can limit the damage done by revenge porn, which is notoriously difficult to stop through legal means.

“Revenge porn images are intensely personal and emotionally damaging, and serve only to degrade the victims — predominantly women,” Google writes in a blog post. Though Google obviously can’t wipe these images from the web, Google is such a core part of most people’s experience of the web that this policy has the ability to make a dramatic change. Google notes that it is establishing a “narrow and limited policy” for these removals, similar to what it already uses to remove published bank account numbers and signatures.

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