Google has made a stand on revenge porn, and it wants to help victims of this new digital offense prevent people from viewing their photos or videos online by removing links to the websites where they are found.
Google Senior Vice President of Google Search Amit Singhal announced in a blog post on Friday that Google will be posting the link to a form people can use to request websites from carrying revenge porn images of themselves to be taken down. The form will be available "in the coming weeks."
"Our philosophy has always been that Search should reflect the whole web," says Singhal. "But revenge porn images are intensely personal and emotionally damaging and serve only to degrade the victims—predominantly women."
The term revenge porn is quite confusing, as it does not always include an element of vengeance. For the most part, however, revenge porn images are often put up on the Internet by angry ex-boyfriends or ex-husbands after a particularly bad breakup.
The Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), in conjunction with a report published by the Intel Security Group, previously McAfee, says 90 percent of revenge porn victims are women, and 49 percent of all victims reported being harassed or stalked online after their ex-partners posted their intimate images without their knowledge and consent.
Due to the digital nature of the offense, only a handful of states have regulations concerning the legality of revenge porn. So far, 16 states have put in place laws that criminalize the posting of other people's intimate data without their consent, 13 of whom enacted those laws within the last 18 months.
But even as revenge porn is an offense unique to the digital age, a growing number of cases are cropping up in the spotlight. The CCRI says around one in 10 people have threatened to post their ex-partners' intimate photos online, and a good 60 percent of them followed through with their threat. Around 59 percent of the time, posters of revenge porn included the victim's full name, while 49 percent also added the victim's social media accounts ripe for the stalkers and harassers.
Most recently, former New Jersey Jets linebacker Jermaine Cunningham was sentenced to three years of probation by Superior Court Judge Robert Mega for posting sexually revealing images of the woman he was dating on his Instagram account and tagging her in the photos. Had the case gone to trial, Cunningham could have faced a maximum of 18 years in prison.
Photo: Mike Knell | Flickr
