Celebgate lawyer threatened Google with lawsuit for not taking it upon itself to remove naked pictures

Oct 2, 2014 20:31 GMT  ·  By

You’ve all heard by now about Celebgate, the famous nude pictures scandal feature young actresses. The photographs, as you may know, were taken from the iCloud after the accounts of all these women were hacked by some dudes that obviously have serious issues.

Well, the lawyers of some of the celebrities targeted by the hackers are apparently teaming up, grabbing their torches and pitchforks and going after… Google. Why? Well, because it seems that Google was insensitive enough to index pictures that have made the rounds on the Internet for the past few weeks.

So let’s get things straight. Since they still have no idea who the hackers are and they can’t get 4Chan to be shut down, despite the despicable PR stunt they pulled the other week, threatening Emma Watson with the release of some nonexistent nude pictures, they’re going to go after the next best thing – Google.

Google has apparently already received a letter from Marty Singer, the lawyer that seems adamant about making some money out of this by representing most of these women in a lawsuit. The letter apparently contains some choice words and accuses Google of “blatantly unethical behavior.”

In short, if Google doesn’t remove the images, they’ll be getting sued because “Google is making millions and profiting from the victimization of women.”

Google, the Internet police?

What this lawyer’s issue seems to be is that Google didn’t automatically take it upon itself to remove these pictures. “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,” the letter allegedly reads.

Sure, the fact that these women were hacked and this type of photos stolen from them is despicable, and the fact that they were posted in various publications is wrong. Should they be publicly available? No. But, unfortunately they are. They continue to make the rounds on the Internet, but that’s not Google’s problem to deal with.

By telling Google that it should have removed the pictures on its own, you’re telling Google that you want it to police the Internet, and that’s not what this company is supposed to do. Google Search, for all intents and purposes, is a search engine – it scours the Internet, puts together the data and returns it to users when prompted.

It’s not just Google that will return pictures of these actresses and singers naked, but other search engines also, simply because that’s what they do.

If you want to have such pictures removed from Google’s search results or the pages of any other similar tool, then go ahead and file takedown requests. It’s going to be a never-ending battle, since the pics will just resurface, but it’s the only thing that will work.

Removing from search results, does not make it disappear

Google, Bing, Yahoo and any other search engine out there, and the companies behind them, were not created to police the Internet; they’re not supposed to do this. Sure, Google and many others have voluntarily engaged in tracking down and removing pictures of child abuse, but that’s about the extent that they agree to filter down the content on the search engine.

Other than that, they’ll remove various links that contain copyrighted content, but refuse to hide entire home pages just because some of the content on the sites is illegal. This is the same conversation copyright owners are having every time they’re accusing Google of continuing to return search results leading to copyrighted content.

It’s the same conversation that we’re going to hear forever. Sure, Google.com and its regional alternatives are some of the most visited websites in the world, but there’s a huge chunk of web traffic that does not move through Google. People will go the traditional way and type in an actual web address rather than ask Google to return an answer.

Shocking, I know, but that’s something that most people actually do and just having Google remove content in their search results does not make it disappear. It’s still there on the original site, accessible just as ever, unless it is removed by the site’s admins. And even then, with viral pictures such as the celeb nudes, they’re likely to keep popping up left and right, on forums and sites because that’s how the Internet works.

So how about we stop complaining about how Google isn’t policing the Internet when we know we’d be accusing the search engine of censorship if it tried doing just that.