Getting an image taken down

If you know which site the file is stored on, start there. The abuse address is usually in the terms, in the privacy policy or in the footer; where none is published at all, that absence already tells you how this will end, and the other four routes should be opened the same day.

What you ask for. In four lines: that you are the person in the material, that you never authorised its publication, the list of addresses, and deletion of the file together with its thumbnails and cached copies. Close with a reasonable deadline — five days, for example.

What you attach. Text only. The image is never attached; if they ask you to identify the content, a screenshot cropped to your face is enough. Keep the sent email with its date: a failure to reply is also evidence.

If they say no. Go one step up, to whoever provides service to that domain. Hosting companies and registrars have their own policies against non-consensual intimate material and publish their own abuse mailboxes. Write to them with the same list and a copy of the complaint that was ignored.

If that service also holds data of yours — an account, an email address, the file on its server — a separate and parallel claim opens: erasure or blocking under the Data Privacy Act. How it is worded is the same as your rights under the Data Privacy Act, with the single difference that the recipient is that operator and not us.

Social networks and messaging apps have a specific category for intimate images shared without permission, separate from the one for nudity. Picking the right one decides the speed: the generic category goes into a slower queue and is refused far more often.

What you ask for. Removal of each post separately and, on top of that, suspension of the account or channel that spread it. These are two different reports, and the second one is almost always forgotten.

What you attach. Confirmation that you are the person in the image, an explicit statement that it was shared without your consent and, where it applies, that the material was generated or edited with AI. Rules on synthetic sexual content are stricter than the ones on nudity, so saying it speeds the case up rather than slowing it down.

If they say no. Repeat the report from the web form rather than from the app: they are often separate pipelines, and the web one lets you explain the case and quote the previous number. That refusal stops nothing, because the other four routes keep running.

Even while the page stays up, you can cut the path by which almost everyone reaches it. Google accepts removal requests for non-consensual intimate imagery and, in a section of its own, for fake sexually explicit content: it asks that you be identifiable in the material, that the content be fake and falsely depict you nude or in a sexually explicit situation, and that it was distributed without your consent. Those are the words used in Google's instructions for removing non-consensual explicit imagery from Search.

What you ask for. De-indexing of specific addresses, one by one. The form does not act on a whole domain or on a profile, so the request is worth exactly what your list is worth.

What you attach. The addresses of the pages and of the images, screenshots that let them be located — they can be cropped so that only your face shows — and an email address where the decision will arrive.

If they say no. Ask for the reason on the same thread and resubmit the address under the correct category, which is usually the box that was ticked wrongly. And keep two built-in limits in mind: the page does not disappear, it only stops appearing in that search engine, and Google says so itself — the content may still be reachable through a shared link, a social post or another search engine. Every new copy needs a new request.

This is the only route that acts on copies which do not exist anywhere yet. Your own device turns the file into a unique code and sends only that code; the image stays with you, and nobody on the other side can rebuild it from the hash.

Where it goes. If you were 18 or older in the material, to StopNCII, the tool built by SWGfL and Meta, which is free and asks three things: that the image is of you, that you have access to it, and that it is intimate in nature. If you were under 18 when it was taken, to Take It Down, run by the US centre NCMEC, also free, and it does not ask you to identify yourself.

A fabricated image works too. The StopNCII questions say it plainly: if the deepfake or synthetic image is of you, you have access to it and it is nude or semi-nude, you can hash it. Significantly edited versions produce a different hash, so each variant is submitted separately.

How it is done. Open the service on the device where the file is, select it, let the hash be generated and save the identifier you get back. It takes minutes and needs no bank account, no lawyer and no intermediary.

If it surfaces anyway. There is nothing to appeal: when a copy slips through, that specific post is reported through the route above, with its address and its screenshot.

The main instrument is Republic Act 9995, the Anti-Photo and Video Voyeurism Act of 2009. It punishes copying or reproducing, selling or distributing, and publishing or broadcasting a recording of a sexual act or of a person's private area without the written consent of the person in it, with three to seven years of imprisonment and a fine of ₱100,000 to ₱500,000 — and it says expressly that this holds even where consent to make the original recording had been given. Section 7 of the same Act keeps material obtained in violation of it out of evidence in any judicial, quasi-judicial, legislative or administrative proceeding.

Where a fabricated image sits. Read closely, the acts that Act punishes after the first one speak of "such photo or video or recording" — the one captured under Section 4(a). An image built from nothing was never captured, so the fit is arguable, while an image that started as a real photograph of you and was altered lands inside it far more comfortably. For adults, the cleaner hook is Section 12 of Republic Act 11313, the Safe Spaces Act of 2019, which names the uploading and sharing, without the consent of the victim, of any form of media containing photos, voice or video with sexual content — wording that does not require the media to be a genuine recording. Section 14 sets the penalty at prisión correccional in its medium period or a fine of ₱100,000 to ₱500,000, or both. Which charge is actually filed is decided by a prosecutor and a court, not by a website: take the folder to a lawyer before choosing the framing.

What the cybercrime law adds. Section 6 of Republic Act 10175, the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, raises the penalty by one degree when an offence under another law is committed through information and communications technologies. Section 13 obliges service providers to keep traffic data and subscriber information for at least six months from the transaction, and content data for six months from the day a preservation order reaches them, extendable once. Section 14 requires disclosure within seventy-two hours of an order issued on a court warrant. The practical reading of all that is a clock: the logs that identify an uploader age out, so a complaint filed in the first weeks has evidence behind it that one filed in the first year does not.

What nobody can do administratively. There is no government office that orders a takedown by letter. The provision that would have let the Department of Justice restrict or block access to computer data, Section 19 of that same Act, was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Disini v. Secretary of Justice, decided on 11 February 2014. Removal therefore comes from the platform, from the host, or from a court.

Where you go. Section 10 of the cybercrime law makes the National Bureau of Investigation and the Philippine National Police responsible for enforcing it, and Section 13 of the Safe Spaces Act puts the PNP Anti-Cybercrime Group in charge of receiving complaints about online sexual harassment and requires it to maintain an online reporting mechanism. In practice that means the PNP Anti-Cybercrime Group or the NBI Cybercrime Division, and a police station with a Women and Children Protection Desk will route a walk-in complaint to them. Take the current intake address or hotline from the agency's own site on the day you file: numbers reposted on third-party pages go stale, and accounts posing as official "cybercrime support" exist precisely to charge victims for nothing.

If the person in the image is a minor. Different law, different urgency. Republic Act 11930, the Anti-OSAEC and Anti-CSAEM Act of 2022, defines a child to include a person regardless of age who is presented, depicted or portrayed as a child, and computer-generated, digitally or manually crafted images of a person made to appear to be a child — the same wording that Republic Act 9775 carried before it. The argument that "it is not a real photograph" therefore does not work here at all. Internet intermediaries must block access to or remove the address within twenty-four hours of notice and report it to the Department of Justice within three days, and internet service providers must notify the PNP or the NBI within forty-eight hours. The Act also lets a parent, a relative, a social welfare officer, a barangay official, a law enforcement officer or any person with personal knowledge file the complaint — the child does not have to do it alone, and nobody has to wait for a reply from a platform before going to the police.

There is no deepfake statute yet. Several bills are sitting in Congress — among them Senate Bill 758, the Deepfake Regulation and Digital Identity Protection Act, filed in August 2025, and Senate Bill 1714, the Digital Likeness and Deepfake Regulation Act, filed in January 2026 — and as of the May 2026 review by the Foundation for Media Alternatives all of them were still pending in committee. A bill is not a law, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Until one passes, the framing comes from the statutes above; how each of them is being read in this context is in how Philippine law treats this.