It’s been a pretty disheartening week on the internet, truth be told: after news emerged on Wednesday over a nude photo leak – one which compromised the consent of hundreds of Australian women, and one which left us questioning both the pervasiveness of rape culture, and the lack of regulation to persecute and track leaks online.
When there’s seemingly few barriers to curb the repercussions of revenge porn online, it’s easy to feel pretty defeated at the prospect of the whole debacle. But today, news from Google is a victory—no matter how small of a step it is—in the fight against cybercrime, and the fight against douchebags who blatantly disregard any modicum of respect that *might* be left in their hollow, petty skulls.
Overnight, Google has announced a plan to curb users’ abilities to find revenge porn through a humble search bar: according to the ABC, Google will soon make an online form public – allowing anyone to request revenge porn items to be removed from the search engine’s results.
In a blog post today, Google’s Amit Singhal writes:
“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.”
Google described revenge porn images as “intensely personal and emotionally damaging,” and acknowledged the limitations of their new policy – where images can’t be deleted from sites themselves, just the Google-based route towards them. Which is a pretty big deal anyway, all things considered.
“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.”
Baby steps, people. Down with revenge porn; down with cybercrime.
You can read Google’s blog post in full over here.
via ABC.
Lead image by Justin Sullivan via Getty.
