Along with a slew of websites and social media platforms, Microsoft is beefing up its policies around “revenge porn” and opting for a new system to help victims report abuse. These gross violations of privacy are commonly (and unartfully) referred to as “revenge porn”.
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Revenge porn – when someone, usually a spurned ex, shares private and sexual images of another person online without that person’s consent – is on the rise, and Internet companies including Google and Reddit have tried to combat it.
Now, Microsoft has also pledged to take a firm stance on revenge porn, with the goal of “putting victims back in control”.
Microsoft launched its own site where users of its services, including OneDrive, Xbox Live and Bing, can report instances of intimate images and videos that have been uploaded without their consent.
In June, Casey Meyering was sentenced to three years in prison in California for operating what the authorities called a “cyber exploitation website” through which he encouraged people to post revenge porn images and then charged victims to remove them.
The page is now available in English “and will be expanded to other languages in the coming weeks”, Beauchere said. “In the most severe and tragic cases, it has even led to suicide”, she said in a blog post.
It only works where Microsoft has access to content, of course, and Beauchere acknowledges that “victims still need stronger protections across the Web and around the world”.
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Beauchere noted that even when search engines delete search results, if the content is hosted elsewhere, there’s little that tech companies can do.
