Google reveals plans to block 'revenge porn' from search results

Google will start blocking "revenge porn" images from search results.

The internet giant has announced it will start to censor "nude or sexually explicit" content shared without the subject's consent from results on its search engine if it received requests to do so.

The move comes two months after the law was changed in the UK, making it a criminal offence punishable with up to two years in prison to share sexually-explicit images without consent.

Amit Singhal, senior vice president of Google Search, wrote in a blog post that the company had heard many "troubling" stories of revenge porn being used to humiliate people and sometime end up on "sextortion" websites, where the victims are blackmailed into paying to have photos removed.

He said: "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.

"So going forward, we'll honour requests from people to remove nude or sexually explicit images shared without their consent from Google 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."

He added that the company would introduce a web form for people to apply to have images removed in coming weeks

"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 honouring people's requests to remove such imagery from our search results can help," he said.