Google comes to the aid of the victims of revenge porn, a form of cyber retribution employed by ex-lovers.
In this day and age, people share both their happy moments and their times of woe with their cyber friends online. It is only natural that they share their anger as well. And unfortunately, when breakups are involved, people do not always act rationally.
And so, blinded by their desire for revenge, people use the intimate pictures that they have of their former partners to put them to shame where everyone can see. And there is no place where such things could be more public then on the internet.
This is the most common story of how explicit nude footage of a person makes its way on the internet without the person’s consent. It seems that this has happened so frequently over the years, that some people decided to make money out of it, under the pretext of enforcing the retribution of ex-lovers.
There are websites such as Myex.com, where malevolent ex-partners can post revealing pictures and videos of their once significant others, along with a message where they can poor their grief and express their anger in a very R-rated manner.
This is how it has gotten the name of revenge porn and it seems that there are quite a few amateur porn aficionados out there, because these websites have been flourishing for a while now.
In order to complete the experience of those who are being shamed on the internet, these websites are actually charging money to take the revealing footage down from their pages, obviously without any assurance that they do not keep a copy that they might reuse at any given time.
This is why these websites contribute to a much more resilient revenge porn than social media platforms. Of course, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram have often seen incidence of revenge porn, but on these platforms, there is an option to report the user who posted the picture and it is possible to actually get the picture taken down free of charge.
Twitter was the first among the social media platforms to take a stand on this horrible breach of privacy. They have managed to provide a facilitated process for the victims of revenge porn, so that they can to have their compromising pictures taken down from the website as soon as possible.
And now, Google is following Twitter’s example and it is taking an active role in the fight. The company has announced that it will respond as swiftly as possible to the requests that users make to have pictures of them taken down from Google Search. Furthermore, Google will actually issue a form that these people need to fill out and this will be the only endeavor they will have to complete in order to be free of the shameful public images.
Other companies are expected to introduce similar strategies in the near future, so that the revenge porn from social media platforms and mainstream websites can be easily removed by those who fall victims to this horrible practice.
As for the specialized websites like Myex.com, there is a law underway that will assure that such practices become punishable by legal means. For the moment, the administrators of such websites are sentenced to jail time for the economic aspect of their deeds and will soon face legal consequences for enabling the breach of privacy of the people that are featured on their pages.
Image Source: laweekly
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