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Google has sought to brush off a $100m celebrity lawsuit against its promulgation of stolen celebrity nude photos by reiterating its active stance toward the removal of ‘tens of thousands’ of illicit images ‘within hours’ of being requested to do so.
Marty Singer, the lawyer who is acting on behalf of the group of celebrities whose iCloud accounts were hacked last month, said: “Google, one of the largest ISPs in the world, with vast resources and a huge support staff, generating multimillions of dollars in revenues on a daily basis, has recklessly allowed these blatant violations to continue in conscious disregard of our clients’ rights.”
The letter to Google explained that other websites such as Twitter had reacted fast to remove any references to the pictures, therefore ensuring the celebrities’ privacy was protected.
Google only removed some of the pictures from its search engine index. The Hollywood Reporters said the reason Google didn’t remove all the pictures was either down to its ‘selfie’ guidelines that say the person who holds the camera owns the pictures (and those that requested all the pictures are taken down weren’t holding the camera) or that only nude pictures were removed.
Pictures of the celebrities including Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Rihanna, Arianna Grande were stolen when hackers were able to bombard Apple’s storage service with random passwords until they were able to gain access.
The pictures were then downloaded and added to messageboards 4Chan and Reddit, where the hackers involved were willing to exchange the pictures for money.
Agencies/Canadajournal
