In line with recent practices by numerous other web companies, Microsoft yesterday announced through a blog post, that it will be helping fight the so called ‘Revenge Porn’ by using a dedicated easy-to-use link removal form, ‘to put victims back in control’.
Revenge Porn, if you don’t know already, is sharing of intimate photographs online without the consent of the person in the photographs, in an attempt to humiliate the victim. While removing these sources by search engines is next to impossible, online services are trying to limit access to them by making them harder for people to find online.
Microsoft though, isn’t the first company coming against revenge porn. As has been reported earlier, many other companies, including Google, have found their own ways of helping the affected people.
Where Google’s link reporting service is a complex process, Microsoft sticks to simplicity, just asking a few basic questions and putting ‘victims back in control’, says Jacqueline Beauchere from Microsoft’s chief online safety office.
However, Google’s decision-tree form is also taking up requests to remove Bank Account details, and thus comes in handy in such cases. Microsoft’s form, as of now, is just for revenge porn removal.
Another effort the tech giant is putting in, includes cutting off access to revenge porn when it is shared via its OneDrive cloud storage service or the Xbox Live games service, as well as searched for via Bing.
[…] this reporting mechanism is but one small step in a growing and much-needed effort across the public and private sectors to address the problem. It’s important to remember, for example, that removing links in search results to content hosted elsewhere online doesn’t actually remove the content from the Internet – victims still need stronger protections across the Web and around the world.
The blog post reads,
Microsoft remains committed to continuing to work with leaders and experts worldwide on this evolving subject, and we expect to learn a great deal as the process moves forward. In the meantime, our hope is that by helping to address requests and to remove these extremely personal photos and videos from our services, we can better support victims as they work to re-claim their privacy, and help to push just a little further in the fight against this despicable practice.
While people have been able to report to Microsoft in the past, the new reporting Web page, available today, has been put up to make it easy for victims to let us know about these particular photos and videos. It is available in English now and will be expanded to other languages in the coming weeks. When Microsoft removes links or content, it says it will do so globally.
