Google is joining Apple in the doghouse over the recent hack of celebrity nude photos.
A lawyer representing Jennifer Lawrence and about a dozen other celebrities who had their Apple iCloud accounts hacked and nude images posted online has threated to file a lawsuit against the search giant for $100 million or more, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. In a letter to the company Wednesday, entertainment industry lawyer Martin Singer said Google has not acted quickly enough to remove the images from YouTube, Blogger, and it's other sites.
The lawyer says Google has been slow to remove images that have been flagged as violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which requires companies to "expeditiously" take down any copyright-infringing images.
"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 for our clients' rights," Singer wrote in the letter.
Google, meanwhile, maintains that it's doing as much as it can, as quickly as possible.
"We've removed tens of thousands of pictures — within hours of the requests being made — and we have closed hundreds of accounts," Google said in a statement sent to PCMag. "The Internet is used for many good things. Stealing people's private photos is not one of them."
In the letter, Singer claims his law firm sent Google the first take-down request about four weeks ago, and has sent more than a dozen additional requests since then, yet images still crop up.
The photos, some of which were confirmed to be authentic, quickly made the rounds on Reddit, Twitter, Imgur, and other corners of the Web. As many of the celebs snapped the photos using their iPhones, there were reports that the images were obtained via a hack of iCloud. Apple, however, denied that iCloud - or Find My iPhone - had been breached. Instead the hackers used rather old-fashioned methods of guessing passwords and answering secret questions, Apple said.
As a result, Apple last month pledged to boost security alerts for iCloud users following the incident.
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