By Kenneth Atisele
Google insists it have removed ‘tens of thousands’ of hacked celebrity pictures from its online platforms.
The online giant were threatened with a $100 million lawsuit by lawyers acting for over a dozen of the female stars involved – which include Jennifer Lawrence, Cara Delevingne, Rihanna and Amber Heard – whose private accounts were hacked and had personal images uploaded online.
But despite the accusations, the company insists it has been working hard to remove the photographs from all of their websites since the requests were made.
The company’s spokesperson told the New York Post newspaper’s Page Six column: “We’ve removed tens of thousands of pictures – within hours of the requests being made – and we have closed hundreds of accounts.
‘The Internet is used for many good things. Stealing people’s private photos is not one of them.’
Lawyer, Marty Singer had sent a strongly-worded letter to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as well as Eric Schmidt and Google lawyers accusing them of ‘blatantly unethical behaviour’ in failing to remove the images – which were first posted on websites Reedit and 4Chan – and ‘making millions from the victimization of women.’
In the letter, the lawyer stated his firm sent a notice to remove the images four weeks ago, and several more since, but many of the photos are still on BlogSpot and YouTube, which are both owned by Google.
He added: ‘Google knows the images are hacked stolen property, private and confidential photos and videos unlawfully obtained and posted by pervert predators who are violating the victims’ privacy rights … Yet Google has taken little or no action to stop these outrageous violations.
‘Because the victims are celebrities with valuable publicity rights you do nothing but collect millions of dollars in advertising revenue … as you seek to capitalise on this scandal rather than quash it.’
