The future of revenge porn is already looking a little hazy now that Snapchat means we can send all our nudies with marginal fear that they’ll be saved to use against us later. Oh, and the increasing crackdowns on revenge porn websites and perhaps, hopefully, the slow realisation that it's a fucked up thing to do.
But now it could really be a thing of the past as a recent ruling in Germany means that, well, for Germans at least, if you ask an ex to remove every single erotic photo of you that they have in their ownership, they have to. Even if they’ve not uploaded any to the internet, and even if you totally consented to the photos in the first place.
The woman in the case had consented at the time to having nudies and video nudies taken of her by her then-boyfriend. However, after they broke up, she asked for the photos and videos to be removed. He refused, so she took him to court (which is pretty bold; he hadn’t yet uploaded the photos online but he could have done at basically any moment). The high court then made a ruling based on the fact that there’s something in the German constitution about giving people ‘the inviolability of human dignity’.
According to The Guardian, the court interpreted that there should be a right to protect people within an ‘intimate sphere’. The interesting part of this was that the man seemingly had no intention of putting the photos online. Maybe she didn’t want to risk him putting them online, or maybe she simply didn’t want him to have access to photos of her naked long after they broke up.
We kind of like the sounds of this, but we bet deleting a slew of naked photos is hardly as satisfying as the good olden day post-break-up ritual of burning actual plasticky photos of exes in bins. Not that we were ever dating anyone for long enough back then for us to even get so much as a fully-clad selfie with whoever we were going to the cinema with. Oh, those good old days.
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Picture: Eylul Aslan
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.