Google just announced some new privacy functions for Google+ that deal with how users report abusive content within the stream as well as abuse within Hangouts.

Here are the changes, as announced by Google’s Pavni Diwanji on Google+:

Reporting content in the stream
You’ll now have more options when reporting bad posts, comments, profiles or photos. This will mean we can deal with misconduct more quickly, and prevent abuse from happening again.

Reporting people in public hangouts
If you ignore someone in a hangout, we immediately mute their audio and video to keep you safe. Now when you report someone in a public hangout, we’ll also automatically record a small snippet and notify the room. We can then check for bad behavior—and once we’ve done that we’ll delete the clip.

As of now, users have seven options to select when reporting content on the network. One new option is “a picture of me I don’t like.” Sites like Facebook will not remove a photo simply because a user doesn’t like it – instead they recommend that users go directly to the poster and ask them to take it down. Google doesn’t mention their policy when it comes to photo removal in their Google+ Policies & Principles, so it’s unclear is this new option is a change in their takedown policy. I’ve reached out to Google for clarification and will let you know when I hear back.

UPDATE: Google has clarified that they do not remove photos based on a user’s dislike. If a user reports a photo and checks that option, it will simply redirect them to ask the user who posted to photo to remove it.