Sophos Cloud Optix
Google has responded to a letter written by a lawyer on behalf of a dozen celebrities whose nude photos were stolen and published online.
The letter, dated 1 October, threatened Google with a $100 million lawsuit for failing to respond to Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices on YouTube and BlogSpot.
The lawyer, Marty Singer, said in the letter that the company’s “don’t be evil” motto is “a sham”, and that the search giant is the internet equivalent of the National Football League (NFL) when it comes to shabby treatment of women.
From the letter, which The Hollywood Reporter got hold of:
If your wives, daughters or relatives were the victims of such blatant violations of basic human rights, surely you would take appropriate action.
But because the victims are celebrities with valuable publicity rights, you do nothing - nothing but collect millions of dollars in advertising revenue from your co-conspirator advertising partners as you seek to capitalize on this scandal rather than quash it.
Like the NFL, which turned a blind eye while its players assaulted and victimized women and children, Google has turned a blind eye while its sites repeatedly exploit and victimize these women.
Singer’s letter called Google’s failure to remove his clients’ images “despicable, reprehensible conduct” – not merely because Google hasn’t been taking the photos down quickly, but also because the company’s “knowingly accommodating, facilitating and perpetuating” the unlawful theft of images.
A Google spokesperson’s told the Independent:
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.
This is yet more fallout of Celebgate: the serial doxing of mostly female celebrities’ nude photos that began in September.
If you’re wondering who the celebrities are behind the threatened $100 million lawsuit, well, we can’t help out, given that Singer didn’t name his clients. It could be just about anybody in Hollywood.
But the big names have included Jennifer Lawrence, Rihanna, Kim Kardashian, and Vanessa Hudgens, among many others.
When Celebgate first broke into headlines, fingers pointed at Apple – an understandable mistake, given that many of the photos had been jimmied out of celebrities’ iCloud storage.
But while suspicions initially swirled around an attack having come via an exploit of an iCloud weakness, it turned out instead that users had been hit with what Apple called a “very targeted attack” on user names, passwords and security questions, via brute-force password/security question guessing and/or phishing.
Apple was in the bull’s-eye during the initial blame game, but Google came into focus soon after.
Within days of the stolen images being published, attorneys for Detroit Tigers pitcher Justin Verlander – who’s dated model, actress and doxing victim Kate Upton – delivered a legal takedown notice to Google that identified 461 URLs that were hosting intimate pictures of the couple, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
A week later, Google had removed only 51% of the images from its search engine, according to its own records.
The images that were left up point to a hazy area of untested legal theory regarding who really owns “selfies”, according to the newspaper – as in, is it the person who holds the camera?
Google also reportedly seemed to differentiate between DMCA notices for nude vs. clothed photographs, given that many of the images it neglected to take down featured the couple wearing clothes.
Google wouldn’t publicly comment on its thinking behind which DMCA notices to heed and which to ignore.
In his letter, Singer also mentioned other ISPs, such as Twitter, that have accommodated the takedown demands – often with far fewer staff and resources than the mighty Google, some within an hour or two of receiving the notice.
Yet Google, in spite of its deep pockets and “Don’t be evil” motto, can’t seem to swing it, he wrote:
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.
In fact, Singer says, BlogSpot accounts have acted as some of the main display sources for the stolen photos, as depositories for downloading the images, and as sources for lists of the images, as well as links to them.
Image of gavel courtesy of Shutterstock.
Security questions are there for making backdoors.
In what town did your father born? What is your favorite teachers first name? Blahblahblah. They are too easy to guess. And many times we are forced to answer those ugly questions.
Nobody is “forcing you to do anything”. You do it because you want that service and answering those questions is the only way to get it.
It’s a security prompt. Hell I doubt they’d care if you’re honest or not. You could always, you know, pick a lie and stick to it.
Who says you have to answer the questions accurately? Just make up something random for the answers. That’s what most of the people I know do.
And who or what forces you to put in the ‘correct’ answers ?
Don’t answer them the way they are asked.
In what town was your father born?
Answer – hgr^43Cfsoe)3Sje
Why is that a question? I thought it had already been decided that the photographer always owns his/her photos, unless he/she transferred the rights to someone else. So by definition, a selfie is owned by the one pictured.
Why Google?
I understand the concept behind this, but the focus is… laughable.
So what if Google was able to remove 100% of the content? Google is NOT the sole means of searching on the internet… merely the most “popular” or well known. Twenty years ago, Yahoo! was the big name in search engines.
But hey.. let’s not forget:
Bing
Lycos
Excite
Alta Vista
Ixquick
DuckDuckGo
And what.. 100+ OTHER search engines. Yeah.. but it is ALL Google’s fault.
People need to wake up and realize that the world is bigger than what the media crams down their throats.
I was about to ask the same thing until I actually read the article.
It’s for failure to remove on Youtube and Blogspot – brands owned by Google – not Google’s search engine.
There is a hard lesson here. While it is terribly unfortunate for the people who have been affected by having their intimate photos appear online, what everyone should now be fully aware of is that what anyone does online is ultimately there forever, and that “data” is impossible to infallibly protect at 100%. We have all become so reliant on ease of use, that we fail to recognize that EVERYTHING is vulnerable… unless we stop using certain technology in all of our daily lives. The youngest generations use mobile devices like toys, always on Facebook, Twitter, et al, like there is no concern, yet ultimately, every facet of their lives is being documented… and that is a scary proposition.
So… am I reading this correctly or does Marty Singer think that Google “owns” the Internet? Google can only control the services that it provides.
Is this guy the male version of Gloria Allred?
Bee-Bau Bee- Bau Beeeeeeeeeeee – Bauuuuuuuuuuuuu
That was the sound of an ambulance racing to the scene of an accident – – – – closely followed by a congress of lawyers….
Who is idiotic enough to post intimate pictures on the internet in any means available? You have the cloud, which is just asking for trouble if you post anything that you wouldn’t have laying around in your living room or shown to your parents and your children. “They” took the intimate photos so why is it everyone else’s fault?
Ridiculous, its trying to cover the sun with one finger, why the celebs dint recognize them fault, how them put the name of her’s pet as secret question if any interview says “Hey this is Flufy my pet say hello to camera baby” seriously? Why pursue hackers, them just find the flaw and exploited, why don’t take all this efforts to make things happen to make a better digital world, reinforce educational programs at school, home and universities to teach cyber security basics. This is not about the leak of naked photos, this is about the future of wives, daughters or relatives who must understand about the world is changing and everybody must evolve.
It’s also about republishing stuff that you stole because you think “information shall be free”, even when you know jolly well you don’t have the legal or moral right to do so.
One hopes that sort of thing would be covered in your educational programs, too.
All the while, Apple and their “weak” security practices get a pass.
How is it weak?
Nobody forced them to use weak passwords or easy to guess security questions.
Use the security questions as another opportunity to drop yet another hard password.
What high school did you go to?
ahel32V6*dk#dsrB
So again, how is it Apple’s fault? Some people need to learn personal responsibility. If they take those extra steps and people still get in – then blame Apple.
OK… some sites with this type of “security” may have multiple questions, like these…
What high school did you go to?
ahel32V6*dk#dsrB
What street did you grow up on?
%5kHreb#23
How was your best freind in college?
bedcktnt’;a&^`98
When did your first ever pet die?
kayne%15^~.?ghT
Now, using YOUR example please tell us that you can remember all of those “answers… and please do not mention using a password manager, because we are talking about non-technical people, and to non-people doing anything other than what they want to do IS TECHNICAL. Of course they can write their answers down and keep them in a wallet or purse, but the only people I know who do that are security people like me, because I do not trust password managers, you know, 10 passwords protected by 1.
So that is my answer.
51% of what number? If Twitter has 10k photos to remove, and Google has 20k, then their rate of response is equivalent even if Google has “only” taken down 50% of the photos. Any what’s the rate of uploads per hour of the photographs for each service?
I do think we’re going to have to determine a legal answer to whether the subjects of photographs have any rights to the distribution of those photographs. It’s a bit murky now.
But I have zero sympathy for these celebrities. If you make a career of vapidly drawing attention to yourself, particularly your body, then you can’t be surprised when people are ogling you. Not to mention the sheer stupidity of taking intimate digital photos. It’s a pretty good rule of thumb that you should not take or have taken any photograph you wouldn’t want the whole world to see. Again, particularly if you’re going to draw the world’s attention to yourself.
I agree with this. Anything posted on the net should be considered public, because any user available encryption method could be hacked. It is not the search engines responsibility to try and police posts.
I think everyone is missing the understanding of what happened. The pictures were stored in the iCloud, which was hacked because the users (supposedly) had weak answers to even weaker questions… then the stolen pictures were posted to the Internet. True, if any of these celebs posted a nudie to FB or some other social network there would be no case, but they didn’t post the pictures. the person(s) who stole the pictures posted them.
That said, I still do not understand how this is all Google’s fault because the pictures show up in a Google search… as someone else mentioned they’ll show up if you “Ask Jeeves”.
Hm. Don’t these same celebrities use these social sites to gain yet even more revenue for themselves? Name-dropping, endorsing, etc etc .. Weren’t they the ones setting themselves up in the first place? Why should it be someone else’s fault that they didn’t secure themselves properly whether using cel phones, computers, or otherwise.
The Celebs are negligent in the first place, if you make digital intimate images and store them in the cloud, them being obtained by people with an agenda is inevitable.
No sympathy for the vanity and ego tripping celebrities, if the photos had made them $$ you wouldn’t hear a single grumble, but no doubt plenty more ego tripping yay’s.
My take on this. If you are stupid enough to take nude pictures of yourself and store them in the “clouds” , you have nobody but your self to blame.
celebrity porn why put it in the cloud we can find it better on a USB with a passeword