5 ms·

Google has destroyed the lives of revenge porn victims

48 points by zxcvbn4038 7y ago

the_decider 7y ago
For google executives, what is more important? Lives destroyed or shareholder profits?
lerey 7y ago
>After her video was posted online, she told us, “I had to change my major and career choice. I lost a lot of friends, and my family wouldn’t talk to me for a while. I have had nightmares about it and dreams that it never happened or that it was somehow erased completely. It was one of the worst things I have ever done and not just because it showed up on the Internet. I wish I could erase that memory out of my mind forever. I was spit on while making the video, and I have never felt more disrespected or devalued in my entire life.” Fuck having responsibility for your actions.
- yhoneycomb 7y ago
  Jesus THAT'S your reaction?? You're trash.
- bobbiechen 7y ago
  Immediately before that in the article: >My clients, all aged 18-22, had answered deceptive bikini-model ads and had become embroiled in a conspiracy to perform porn that resulted in some of them being raped before and during the shoots. Should victims have to take responsibility for the impact of the crimes committed against them? And in any scenario, I think the article brings up a good point: >But even if we do something “negative,” to use Lieu’s term, should that mean we deserve to be connected to it for the rest of our lives? The Internet makes it possible for descriptions of your past, truthful or not, to follow you forever. The idea of a "right to be forgotten" tries to balance against this.
  - blunte 7y ago
    At some point, hopefully, people accept that people (themselves and others) are human. Being human involves trying things, trying to make a living, exploring things, and... even sexual things. There are some fairly generally accepted limits regarding sexuality (and age of "participants", as well as consent). But humanly speaking, there is no doubt that we all have bodies with various parts, and most people get some pleasure from contact on those parts. Shaming people for doing so is like shaming someone for eating food.
  - xiphias2 7y ago
    This doesn't look like revenge porn to me. Revenge porn is when an ex-boyfriend shares a video of the couple having sex. This is real porn, and maybe the victim wasn't payed (in which case she should be).
420codebro 7y ago
As fucked up as it is, I see society changing in terms of attitude. If someone were to anonymously mail me nudes of one of my co-workers, the first thought is this person's privacy has been violated and this is abhorrent. Yes there are folks who will use it for further hurtful purposes, but compared to a generation or two ago I feel there is less "slut shaming" these days. People fuck. People take pics of themselves and others naked while fucking. It is fun. It is part of the human experience. It is really fucking lame when someone weaponizes those natural behaviors against someone out of pure hatred or spite. People who do such things have serious psychological problems and should seek counseling.
ahmetyas01 7y ago
any google worker here?
- blunte 7y ago
  You know there is; HN is full of Googlers. But it's very, very tricky for them to make public statements about hot topics like this. Executive and people with authority to actually handle situations like these are probably not here, or even they are afraid to speak openly. It takes a lot of commitment and guts to risk a career and really good income to just make a statement on a forum.
writepub 7y ago
Search engines should treat searches on individuals as a separate, special category. Laws need to be protect personal information from Google's excuses. When federal laws on personally identifiable information were drafted, they weren't intended for a world where a megacorp indexed it all, and made it widely accessible, with no course for challenge. U.S. laws need to catch up with reality.
- merpnderp 7y ago
  Information wants to be free regardless of virtue of your claim, and the first amendment will make an impossible hurdle for would be censors.
  - whoopdedo 7y ago
    You beg the question that free information is always a good thing, and that anything which gets in the way is censorship -- in other words, evil. There are ways that information can be used to cause harm. If it were not the case we wouldn't need encryption. As a society, we must be capable of enacting laws that define when information is harmful and thus not allowed. Is this censorship? Is it evil?
merpnderp 7y ago
I really feel for these people, but if Google gets into the content moderation business it will never end. They could spend all their resources trying to manage the floodgate that would open, but it wouldn’t be enough trying to appease all the different jurisdictions, advocacy groups, and lawsuits once they become anything besides a neutral entity. Actually I really don’t like Google and would love to see them drown under the onslaught. Plus a lot of people would get some temporary relief until search moves to someone still neutral.
blunte 7y ago
Google needs to inject a bit more humanity into its business. Yes this is a special case, but certainly they already have a mechanism for skipping some listings. This is an issue of goodwill, which perhaps still Google doesn't feel the pressure to build (due to something related to monopoly position). If businesses, from the very largest to the smallest, do not behave as collections of real humans, then we might as well be living under Skynet. Honestly, if what makes us empathetic and caring is ignored, then at some point software should replace us. But regarding revenge porn, porn, sexuality, nudity, etc., I think it's way past time that people realize that we all have naked bits. It's really no more astonishing than a tree having leaves and bark, and the occasional fruit! I believe religion has something to do with the largely artifically-ignorant view of nakeness and sexuality, but most religion is just a disguise for population control. So whatever the name of the leadership, the fact remains that people without clothes have nipples and other bits that US television can fine you for showing (honestly, it had never occurred to me that Janet Jackson had nipples!). For these women who have been duped and taken advantage of, based on the current societal norms, it's terrible. Google should have some human sympathy in its organization, and it should have some executing willing to demonstrate the importance of Google being part of humanity. But at the same time, I hope the younger generations can finally return humans to their more natural state.
envy2 7y ago
This article focuses on Google not being liable, but ignores the fact that the specific creators and posters of the content appearing in Google's search results certainly can be sued. There have been a lot of anti-CDA 230 sob stories lately, which have indeed highlighted real victims of online content and abuse, but imposing liability on platforms simply destroys the free and open internet. Search engines would cease to exist if they became liable for simply indexing content created by others, and sites like Hacker News wouldn't be able to allow user submissions and comments. We need to be careful to avoid victim-blaming, but equally important to recognize that very real harms to some people don't justify upending policies that have created enormous value for society as a whole. Not to mention that, even without CDA 230, the majority of the problematic speech online would remain legal in the US because of the First Amendment.
- writepub 7y ago
  When Google indexes reputation impacting personal information, it is not verifying the authenticity of the information. This leads to a potential market for reputation harming falsehoods to be SEO-ed to the top of search results. Sure, section 203 indemnifies Google et al, but it creates an incentive for bad faith actors to exploit the system. What is your solution for this problem?
  - envy2 7y ago
    The bad actors are still liable. You go after them to force them to remove the original content that is being indexed. Yes, it's whack-a-mole, but that will forever be the nature of the internet or any other tool that facilitates democratized content creation at effectively zero cost.
    - writepub 7y ago
      No - Google should be liable if it enables repeat offenders to purchase ad-dollars and SEO their way up to the top. At that point, Google isn't an innocent by-stander, but enabler. The article mentions a clear pattern, where the base URL stays the same, and small variations are employed to circumvent any legal actions, because Google refuses to acknowledge the "repeat offender" status of the base URL.
kraig911 7y ago
So who is more liable. The card catalog with a reference to something awful or the actual thing that did something awful?
- geofft 7y ago
  The "awful" part of revenge porn is not (in most cases) the image itself, but its publicity.
floatingatoll 7y ago
Search engines came into existence back in the late 90s as a way to replace human-curated indexes of content so that the CPC (cost per click) for display advertisements could be reduced. Twenty years later, we are still realizing the price that we pay for universal indexing of all human-created content: we have enabled hate groups to congregate safely under anonymous identities, while simultaneously enabling the complete loss of having a "private life" away from the prying eyes of others. Yahoo's human-curated index, and the many "books about the Internet" that were published back in the day, certainly did not have the breadth of coverage that search engines did. But in return for that, every site you visited could be assumed to have at least the value the index stated it would have. Topical, relevant, curated. And safe. This article isn't the best at expressing this point, but they're realizing the same thing that few of my tech friends wish to consider: Stripping away the human review and approval process of maintaining a "card catalog" index of websites may have been profitable, but it comes at the cost of our humanity.
- kibibu 7y ago
  A human-curated list would be significantly shorter today, with the way the Web has centralized.
  - floatingatoll 7y ago
    That seems false. There are more domestic airlines, more web hosting companies, more blogging platforms, and in general more ways we use the Internet. I agree it might not be much longer in any given leaf category node.
cybersnowflake 7y ago
lol "destroyed"? "merciliessly"? I love it in a world where a lot of bad shit goes down only the stuff that involves women and sex is automatically hyped up to the most important, even more than genocide. So every woman automatically gets a sort of 'supercopyright' where she can decide 20 years down the line what happens to every single copy of certain 'embarrassing' images of her across the entire world. Why not other types of images? I mean Bush puking on the Japanese PM was pretty embarrassing. Oh so because its a woman, even though she openly and knowingly released the pics in public, its still special. Man we really are still Puritans, still pedestalizing sex and the honor of our ladyfolk.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jshaqaw 7y ago
  There is clearly more at stake here than you acknowledge. The creep job one stalkers who made the lives of these women hell beyond personal embarrassment. And these were cases of non consensual sex cited in the article. For gods sake man grow a little empathy and honor before you keyboard blast.
  - cybersnowflake 7y ago
    Harassment and rape are separate crimes. There is no need to institute a special global supercopyright for poor oppressed womyn and trample the free flow of information to prosecute those.
zxcvbn4038 7y ago
The part that that had always intrigued me is how data aggregators seem to really enjoy the fight when someone wants their data removed. If it were really just about marketing - why waste time and money peddling to people who don’t want to be peddled to? I think at some level it’s more about being able to cause people discomfort and annoyance without repercussions, and I think there is a significant population of disempowered people that appeals to. Like some variant of the Stanford prison experiment perhaps?

48 points by zxcvbn4038 7y ago

For google executives, what is more important? Lives destroyed or shareholder profits?

>After her video was posted online, she told us, “I had to change my major and career choice. I lost a lot of friends, and my family wouldn’t talk to me for a while. I have had nightmares about it and dreams that it never happened or that it was somehow erased completely. It was one of the worst things I have ever done and not just because it showed up on the Internet. I wish I could erase that memory out of my mind forever. I was spit on while making the video, and I have never felt more disrespected or devalued in my entire life.” Fuck having responsibility for your actions.

yhoneycomb 7y ago
Jesus THAT'S your reaction?? You're trash.
bobbiechen 7y ago
Immediately before that in the article: >My clients, all aged 18-22, had answered deceptive bikini-model ads and had become embroiled in a conspiracy to perform porn that resulted in some of them being raped before and during the shoots. Should victims have to take responsibility for the impact of the crimes committed against them? And in any scenario, I think the article brings up a good point: >But even if we do something “negative,” to use Lieu’s term, should that mean we deserve to be connected to it for the rest of our lives? The Internet makes it possible for descriptions of your past, truthful or not, to follow you forever. The idea of a "right to be forgotten" tries to balance against this.
- blunte 7y ago
  At some point, hopefully, people accept that people (themselves and others) are human. Being human involves trying things, trying to make a living, exploring things, and... even sexual things. There are some fairly generally accepted limits regarding sexuality (and age of "participants", as well as consent). But humanly speaking, there is no doubt that we all have bodies with various parts, and most people get some pleasure from contact on those parts. Shaming people for doing so is like shaming someone for eating food.
- xiphias2 7y ago
  This doesn't look like revenge porn to me. Revenge porn is when an ex-boyfriend shares a video of the couple having sex. This is real porn, and maybe the victim wasn't payed (in which case she should be).

420codebro 7y ago

As fucked up as it is, I see society changing in terms of attitude. If someone were to anonymously mail me nudes of one of my co-workers, the first thought is this person's privacy has been violated and this is abhorrent. Yes there are folks who will use it for further hurtful purposes, but compared to a generation or two ago I feel there is less "slut shaming" these days. People fuck. People take pics of themselves and others naked while fucking. It is fun. It is part of the human experience. It is really fucking lame when someone weaponizes those natural behaviors against someone out of pure hatred or spite. People who do such things have serious psychological problems and should seek counseling.

ahmetyas01 7y ago

any google worker here?

blunte 7y ago
You know there is; HN is full of Googlers. But it's very, very tricky for them to make public statements about hot topics like this. Executive and people with authority to actually handle situations like these are probably not here, or even they are afraid to speak openly. It takes a lot of commitment and guts to risk a career and really good income to just make a statement on a forum.

writepub 7y ago

Search engines should treat searches on individuals as a separate, special category. Laws need to be protect personal information from Google's excuses. When federal laws on personally identifiable information were drafted, they weren't intended for a world where a megacorp indexed it all, and made it widely accessible, with no course for challenge. U.S. laws need to catch up with reality.

merpnderp 7y ago
Information wants to be free regardless of virtue of your claim, and the first amendment will make an impossible hurdle for would be censors.
- whoopdedo 7y ago
  You beg the question that free information is always a good thing, and that anything which gets in the way is censorship -- in other words, evil. There are ways that information can be used to cause harm. If it were not the case we wouldn't need encryption. As a society, we must be capable of enacting laws that define when information is harmful and thus not allowed. Is this censorship? Is it evil?

merpnderp 7y ago

I really feel for these people, but if Google gets into the content moderation business it will never end. They could spend all their resources trying to manage the floodgate that would open, but it wouldn’t be enough trying to appease all the different jurisdictions, advocacy groups, and lawsuits once they become anything besides a neutral entity. Actually I really don’t like Google and would love to see them drown under the onslaught. Plus a lot of people would get some temporary relief until search moves to someone still neutral.

blunte 7y ago

Google needs to inject a bit more humanity into its business. Yes this is a special case, but certainly they already have a mechanism for skipping some listings. This is an issue of goodwill, which perhaps still Google doesn't feel the pressure to build (due to something related to monopoly position). If businesses, from the very largest to the smallest, do not behave as collections of real humans, then we might as well be living under Skynet. Honestly, if what makes us empathetic and caring is ignored, then at some point software should replace us. But regarding revenge porn, porn, sexuality, nudity, etc., I think it's way past time that people realize that we all have naked bits. It's really no more astonishing than a tree having leaves and bark, and the occasional fruit! I believe religion has something to do with the largely artifically-ignorant view of nakeness and sexuality, but most religion is just a disguise for population control. So whatever the name of the leadership, the fact remains that people without clothes have nipples and other bits that US television can fine you for showing (honestly, it had never occurred to me that Janet Jackson had nipples!). For these women who have been duped and taken advantage of, based on the current societal norms, it's terrible. Google should have some human sympathy in its organization, and it should have some executing willing to demonstrate the importance of Google being part of humanity. But at the same time, I hope the younger generations can finally return humans to their more natural state.

envy2 7y ago

This article focuses on Google not being liable, but ignores the fact that the specific creators and posters of the content appearing in Google's search results certainly can be sued. There have been a lot of anti-CDA 230 sob stories lately, which have indeed highlighted real victims of online content and abuse, but imposing liability on platforms simply destroys the free and open internet. Search engines would cease to exist if they became liable for simply indexing content created by others, and sites like Hacker News wouldn't be able to allow user submissions and comments. We need to be careful to avoid victim-blaming, but equally important to recognize that very real harms to some people don't justify upending policies that have created enormous value for society as a whole. Not to mention that, even without CDA 230, the majority of the problematic speech online would remain legal in the US because of the First Amendment.

writepub 7y ago
When Google indexes reputation impacting personal information, it is not verifying the authenticity of the information. This leads to a potential market for reputation harming falsehoods to be SEO-ed to the top of search results. Sure, section 203 indemnifies Google et al, but it creates an incentive for bad faith actors to exploit the system. What is your solution for this problem?
- envy2 7y ago
  The bad actors are still liable. You go after them to force them to remove the original content that is being indexed. Yes, it's whack-a-mole, but that will forever be the nature of the internet or any other tool that facilitates democratized content creation at effectively zero cost.
  - writepub 7y ago
    No - Google should be liable if it enables repeat offenders to purchase ad-dollars and SEO their way up to the top. At that point, Google isn't an innocent by-stander, but enabler. The article mentions a clear pattern, where the base URL stays the same, and small variations are employed to circumvent any legal actions, because Google refuses to acknowledge the "repeat offender" status of the base URL.

kraig911 7y ago

So who is more liable. The card catalog with a reference to something awful or the actual thing that did something awful?

geofft 7y ago
The "awful" part of revenge porn is not (in most cases) the image itself, but its publicity.

floatingatoll 7y ago

Search engines came into existence back in the late 90s as a way to replace human-curated indexes of content so that the CPC (cost per click) for display advertisements could be reduced. Twenty years later, we are still realizing the price that we pay for universal indexing of all human-created content: we have enabled hate groups to congregate safely under anonymous identities, while simultaneously enabling the complete loss of having a "private life" away from the prying eyes of others. Yahoo's human-curated index, and the many "books about the Internet" that were published back in the day, certainly did not have the breadth of coverage that search engines did. But in return for that, every site you visited could be assumed to have at least the value the index stated it would have. Topical, relevant, curated. And safe. This article isn't the best at expressing this point, but they're realizing the same thing that few of my tech friends wish to consider: Stripping away the human review and approval process of maintaining a "card catalog" index of websites may have been profitable, but it comes at the cost of our humanity.

kibibu 7y ago
A human-curated list would be significantly shorter today, with the way the Web has centralized.
- floatingatoll 7y ago
  That seems false. There are more domestic airlines, more web hosting companies, more blogging platforms, and in general more ways we use the Internet. I agree it might not be much longer in any given leaf category node.

cybersnowflake 7y ago

lol "destroyed"? "merciliessly"? I love it in a world where a lot of bad shit goes down only the stuff that involves women and sex is automatically hyped up to the most important, even more than genocide. So every woman automatically gets a sort of 'supercopyright' where she can decide 20 years down the line what happens to every single copy of certain 'embarrassing' images of her across the entire world. Why not other types of images? I mean Bush puking on the Japanese PM was pretty embarrassing. Oh so because its a woman, even though she openly and knowingly released the pics in public, its still special. Man we really are still Puritans, still pedestalizing sex and the honor of our ladyfolk.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jshaqaw 7y ago
There is clearly more at stake here than you acknowledge. The creep job one stalkers who made the lives of these women hell beyond personal embarrassment. And these were cases of non consensual sex cited in the article. For gods sake man grow a little empathy and honor before you keyboard blast.
- cybersnowflake 7y ago
  Harassment and rape are separate crimes. There is no need to institute a special global supercopyright for poor oppressed womyn and trample the free flow of information to prosecute those.

zxcvbn4038 7y ago

The part that that had always intrigued me is how data aggregators seem to really enjoy the fight when someone wants their data removed. If it were really just about marketing - why waste time and money peddling to people who don’t want to be peddled to? I think at some level it’s more about being able to cause people discomfort and annoyance without repercussions, and I think there is a significant population of disempowered people that appeals to. Like some variant of the Stanford prison experiment perhaps?