Google is joining a very important fight.
On Friday, the tech giant announced plans to tackle the growing Internet issue of revenge porn by removing private photos that have been posted without a person's consent from Google Search results.
In a blog post, Google says it has heard of too many troubling stories of an ex posting private photos, or hackers who have accessed victims' accounts. 'Revenge porn images are intensely personal and emotionally damaging, and serve only to degrade the victims—predominantly women,' says Google.
Google doesn't have the power to remove the intimate pictures from the sites on which they live, but the search engine is looking to do its part by at least making them difficult to find: 'We know this won't solve the problem—but we hope that honoring people's requests to remove such imagery from our search results can help.'
In coming weeks, Google will update the blog post with a link where users can submit requests to remove any sexually explicit images that have been shared without consent. The company follows in the footsteps of both Twitter and the social forum site Reddit, which launched its policy in response to the multiple celebrity nude photo scandals that have affected hundreds of Hollywood stars in the past year.
From the editors at ELLE.COM.
