Google to crack down on ‘revenge porn’

Google planned to censor unauthorised nude photos from its influential internet search engine in a policy change aimed at cracking down on a malicious practice known as 'revenge porn.'

The new rules would allow people whose naked pictures had been posted on a website without their permission to ask Google to prevent links to the image from appearing in its search results. Google would make available a form for submitting the censorship requests within the next few weeks.

The internet search company had traditionally resisted efforts to erase online content from its internet search engine, maintaining that its judgments about information and images needed to be limited to how relevant the material was to each person's query.

With the  libertarian approach Google was able to establish itself as the world's most dominant search engine, processing roughly two-thirds of all online requests for information.

The Mountain View, California, company had decided to make an exception with the unauthorised sharing of nude photos as those images were often posted by ex-spouses, or partners in a broken romance or extortionists demanding ransoms to take down the pictures.

"Revenge porn images are intensely personal and emotionally damaging, and serve only to degrade the victims - predominantly women," Amit Singhal, Google's senior vice president of search, wrote in a Friday blog post.

"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," Singhal said.

"Some images even end up on 'sextortion' sites that force people to pay to have their images removed. 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."

Singhal said Google will "honor requests from people to remove nude or sexually explicit images shared without their consent from Google search results."

He added it was "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 search results.

"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."