Google has been threatened with a $100 million (£62 million) lawsuit over the infamous “fappening” leaks of stolen nude celebrity photos, which first came to a head when the initial batch was posted up on 4chan just over a month ago.Celebs believe that the search engine didn’t take adequate measures to prevent people from viewing their photos after they were posted on 4Chan.
Marty Singer is the attorney hired by the group of celebs who became the victim of this hack attack in which their iCloud accounts were hacked in September.
“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”,Marty commented.
The celebrities whose pictures were involved include Kate Upton, Jennifer Lawrence, Arianna Grande and Rihanna. The hack attack became possible when the attackers bombarded Apple’s storage service iCloud with random passwords till the time they hit the jackpot and gained access.
On the other hand, Google just removed some of the photographs from the index of its search engine. According to Hollywood Reporter, the reason behind Google’s slow and insufficient reaction was either due to its ‘selfie’ policy guidelines which state that whoever has the camera is the owner of the picture or that they just removed the nude photos.
Apple stated :
“After more than 40 hours of investigation, we have discovered that certain celebrity accounts were compromised by a very targeted attack on user names, passwords and security questions, a practice that has become all too common on the internet. None of the cases we have investigated has resulted from any breach in any of Apple’s systems, including iCloud and Find my iPhone.”