14 DAY TRIAL // Google has found itself in quite the PR pickle recently as lawyers of the female celebrities targeted in the recent Celebgate scandal are teaming up and suing the search engine giant because it failed to remove all the intimate leaked photos from the internet.
The lawsuit is said to be worth in excess of $100 million (€79,2 million) according to Page Six and that's because the lawyers are saying Google is “making millions from the victimization of women.”
A few weeks back, stars like Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Amber Heard, Rihanna and Ariana Grande have been leaked online by a yet-unidentified hacker or group of hackers and this has in turn created huge debates about online security and the right to privacy of female celebrities.
Google is being threatened by lawyers who have written a strongly-worded letter
The lawyer who represents most of the women affected in the leak, Marty Singer, has already taken the first steps in his war on Google and has apparently “written a sternly-worded letter to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.” The letter is said to contain some choice words and basically accuses the founders of “blatantly unethical behavior.”
We find out that in the letter, Singer blames Google for failing “to act expeditiously, and responsibly to remove the images, but in knowingly accommodating, facilitating, and perpetuating the unlawful conduct. Google is making millions and profiting from the victimization of women.”
Lawyers claim Google has failed to remove the material from its websites
The lawyer goes on to complain that he's fired off several legal letters in the past few weeks aimed at removing several images and videos from Google sites BlogSpot and YouTube, and yet Google has failed to act.
In what can be only described as a very harsh tone, the lawyer concludes with the accusations that “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.”
Google has yet to respond to these serious allegations that claim the company has made millions off of the leaked material in the form of advertising revenue and is in fact looking to capitalize on the scandal rather than end it.
Efforts to remove the photos after they initially were leaked online have met with poor results, since taking them down on one site would normally be followed by their appearance somewhere else on the internet.