Revenge Porn Image Removal and Google
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For those who know that questioning everything includes questioning this show's existence. The Last Show with David Cooper. If you've ever Googled yourself and you didn't quite like what you found, maybe personal information on the internet that you wish wasn't there, your address, your phone number, maybe images of you. Historically, Google wouldn't really take that stuff down unless you did some wacky legal stuff to them. But now it seems like they are allowing users to take off personal information from search results. Let's talk about this here with Carmi Levy, a tech expert. analyst it is time for technology time carmy welcome in good to be with you thanks so much for having me david i kind of buried the lead this also goes for like explicit pictures which i think you know average people due to an unfortunate set of circumstances like revenge pornography this kind of thing can find awful stuff on the internet publicly available and a google who has historically in some cases not taken that stuff down it looks like they're doing a 180 on this one
Yeah, finally. I mean, yeah, non-consensual explicit images are rampant online. And in many cases, the victims did not intend for them to be online. They were posted by someone, perhaps a vengeful ex or someone else, a cyber criminal. And so they find when you go searching for your name, suddenly this thing pops up and you realize it's incredibly damaging. And so They're building it into the features called results about you.
How can Google help remove explicit images from search results?
And whenever you search for an image, if you feel that it qualifies as that, you can have Google, you can ask them to remove it from their index so that when someone searches, It will not show up in a Google search. Now, the fine sort of line here is that the original image will still be online. It's just that Google will not find it when you search for it. That's the key difference. You still have to go to the original website, the original platform to have it removed. But at least it's a lot harder for somebody to find. It does a lot more to protect you from ensuring that other people will not see this content.
There was an irony, a perverse irony that existed in the U.S. At least there's something called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And it's basically so like musicians can if my song ends up on YouTube, I can ask YouTube to take it down because it's my copyrighted creative work. So if I was an adult entertainer, let's say I had an OnlyFans or something and I posted explicit photos of myself. That's a copyrightable creative work. So if I was a professional adult entertainer, I could say, hey, Google, take down these copyrighted images and Google would do it. But if I was just like a private person whose photos ended up on the Internet, it would be so difficult to take down. To me, that's so wild that someone who does it professionally, who I guess wouldn't care if the world saw it, they could take it down.
But me as a private person couldn't before. At least now there's a little bit of fairness there.
Yeah, it shows just how much the Internet has evolved since these original tools, since the DMCA, which I believe was enacted something like 20 years ago, first became a thing. And some non-consensual imagery has become epidemic online. And so, you know, I think Google is recognizing that a lot of the tools that are used to support DMCA takedown requests can also be redeployed, so to speak, for this kind of activity as well. It's just another layer of protection. They're also going to include a feature that when you tag something, so you see a photo, it's non-consensual, it's explicit, you click on the three dots, you flag it to remove it, and then it will then, in its index, If someone else searches for it or their other matches, if similar imagery shows up in Google's index, you'll be notified.
And so there's automation then that also protects you going forward. It's not just that specific image data. It's others. And so I think it recognizes that the internet's a very dangerous place.
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