Google is making efforts to combat revenge porn by changing its policy and search functions.
The tech company will now accept requests from victims of revenge porn who want to remove any private photos shared without their consent from its search results.
"Our philosophy has always been that Search should reflect the whole web," Amit Singhal, senior vice president of Google Search, wrote on a company blog.
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"But revenge porn images are intensely personal and emotionally damaging, and serve only to degrade the victims — predominantly women. So going forward, we’ll honor requests from people to remove nude or sexually explicit images shared without their consent from Google Search results."
Google said it will post a Web form in the coming weeks that people can use to submit such requests. The new policy will be similar to how Google treats removal requests for other highly sensitive personal information, like bank account numbers and signatures, that may show up in search results.
"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 honoring people’s requests to remove such imagery from our search results can help," Singhal wrote.
Former New York Jets linebacker Jermaine Cunningham was sentenced last week to probation in a case that invoked New Jersey's landmark revenge porn law.
The decade-old New Jersey law was the first of its kind in the country. It forbids disclosing photos or videos without consent of someone "whose intimate parts are exposed" or who is engaged in a sexual act. More than a dozen states have passed similar laws.
Twitter banned revenge porn in March.