Microsoft has announced that it will be joining the fight against revenge porn by launching a new site to help victims take back control of images shared without their permission.
Revenge Porn and Betrayed Trust
Revenge porn isn’t a new internet trend, it’s been going on for years. In fact, many site owners are being arrested and charged with identity theft and extortion. Revenge porn is the name given to sexually explicit photographs released online by someone usually involved in the victim’s life. The act is quite different than nonconsensual pornography because identifiable details about the victim often accompany the pictures.
Unfortunately, laws are often slow to catch up to the emerging culture of the internet, and there aren’t many states out there that have laws that specifically pertain to revenge porn. Many states, like California, have amended the state’s disorderly conduct law in order to criminalize forms of revenge porn.
Google, Microsoft is Taking the Power Back
Recently, there have been a string of huge players joining in the fight against revenge porn sites, including Google and now Microsoft. Microsofts search engine, Bing, will now offer a web form that users can fill out in order to remove links that provide intimate content or information about the user without their consent. And unfortunately, as Beyonce is familiar with, deleting things off the internet is difficult to do, and you can never be sure those photos haven’t already been downloaded millions of times already. For the victim, it’s a dire and helpless situation.
Jacqueline Beauchere, chief officer of online safety at Microsoft, recently stated in a blog post that revenge porn has very damaging effects on all aspects of the victim’s life. It can negatively impair relationships and career prospects. In the blog post, Beauchere explains that this is why the company has decided to take action — even going so far as to shutting down a personal OneDrive or Xbox Live account that is hosting revenge porn.
Banding Together
Last month, Google was one of the first tech giants to implement an idea similar to Microsoft’s. Google’s program promises to remove search results that link to revenge porn. Similarly, Twitter also updated its terms to reflect that the company seriously looks down on posting any content that may be identifiable as revenge porn. More recently, they’ve begun introducing new rules and new sections of the site related to “private information” and “threats and abuse”.
Revenge porn may be gaining popularity, but it’s good to see companies banding together in order to help protect their users’ privacy. The U.K. recently ruled that revenge porn is now illegal, punishable by two years in prison, so hopefully laws in the U.S. will catch up.
