MOUNTAIN VIEW — Wary of tampering with its search results, Google said Friday it is making an exception for nude or sexually explicit images posted without consent.
The company is taking a step toward confronting the widely reported problem of “revenge porn,” when an ex-partner or hackers maliciously post a person’s private (or surreptitously taken) photos online; and “sextortion,” which involves forcing people to pay to have the images removed.
The announcement comes days after California Attorney General Kamala Harris announced a guilty plea in the case against a hacker accused of profiting from the theft of “private and intimate” photos. Earlier this year, a San Diego Web developer was convicted of multiple counts of identity theft and extortion and sentenced to a jail term for posting pictures and then charging women up to $350 to have the pictures removed.
Says Amit Singhal, head of Google Search, in a blog post Friday:
“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.”
The company will put up a Web form in the coming weeks to submit the requests, he said. “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,” Singhal wrote.
Contact Matt O’Brien at 408-920-5011. Follow him at Twitter.com/mattoyeah.
