Metro Manila (CNN Philippines) — Dolly has been combating the most embarrassing and revolting episode of her life for the past three years.
Dolly, 23, a single parent, was a victim of digital harassment. It was, however, not an ordinary harassment.
She was a victim of “revenge porn.”
These videos and images are used to blackmail or torture the victim.
Three years ago, Dolly’s scandalous and illicit video surfaced on the Internet, apparently uploaded by her former boyfriend.
Dolly’s boyfriend was subsequently arrested, but despite this, the Internet has immortalized her video.
Dolly certainly is not alone in this situation. Many women have become victims of revenge porn.
Incidents of revenge porn have affected lives. This is why search engine giant Google is taking a giant leap to crack down on revenge porn.
“We’ve heard many troubling stories of revenge porn. Our philosophy has always been that search should reflect the whole Web,” Amit Singhal, senior vice president for Google Search, recently said in a blog post.
“Revenge porn images are intensely personal and emotionally damaging, and serve only to degrade the victims,” he added.
He said that Google “would honor requests from people to remove nude or sexually explicit images shared without their consent from 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,” Singhal said.
Singhal, however, was quick to note that this step will not 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,” he said.
