Revenge porn has already been taken very seriously, very quickly over the last few years, and now experts are warning that leaked teenagers’ nudes could stay online forever.
The report follows a spate of cases in Australia, where a website had cropped up encouraging boys to post naked photos of girls on to its online forum.
Roderic Broadhurst, an Australian National University cyber crime expert, has said that the photos posted on the site, and similar ones across the world, could be impossible to remove from the internet.
“We sometimes call them bulletproof ISP locations – jurisdictions that don’t have standard cyber crime legislation … that don’t have laws that enable people who use those sites to be extradited,” he said.
“They operate through proxies, in other words, they shift around their location. Although a service might be located in one place, it appears to be operating from another.
“If those images sit on a database in a foreign jurisdiction, where you don’t have mutual legal assistance, how are we to recover them or stop them moving around?”
He rounded off by saying, “These young women possibly have to live with the fact these images are out there forever.”
It brings a spotlight once more to being safe on the internet.