Google has responded to accusations made that the Internet company reacted slowly to the uploading of leaked nude images of celebrities on its sites, stating that it was able to remove "tens of thousands" of the hacked images.
The images were stolen by hackers through the iCloud accounts of the celebrities, which were then published online. Just a few of the celebrities affected by the issue include Jennfier Lawrence, Kate Upton and Kaley Cuoco.
Google received a $100 million lawsuit from lawyers that represent some of the celebrities who had their nude images leaked. The lawyers filed the lawsuit amid allegations that Google ignored requests to take down the images that were hosted on Google-owned properties.
The lawyers are accusing Google of failure to quickly remove the pictures as mandated by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. They are claiming that after four weeks from the first DMCA notice to take down the pictures, and with dozens more sent since then, the pictures can still be found on several Google-owned websites.
The lawyers are claiming that the Internet group is"making millions and profiting from the victimization of women," exposing the company to potential damages that could exceed $100 million.
However, Google is saying that the company took swift action in response to the scandal.
"We've removed tens of thousands of pictures -- within hours of the requests being made -- and we have closed hundreds of accounts," said Google in a statement sent to ZDNet. "The Internet is used for many good things. Stealing people's private photos is not one of them."
Google said that its removal of the pictures are because the images are violations towards the community guidelines that the company has set regarding privacy and nudity.
According to Google, the turnaround time to removing the pictures is only hours, not weeks as the lawyers are claiming.
The lawyers are also demanding from Google to delete the images from its properties, Blogger and YouTube, along with the suspension or termination of accounts that uploaded the images.
The legal actions carried out against Google come after similar questions on the profits gained from the scandal by Reddit, whose subreddit titled "The Fappening" was able to generate enough revenue to run the company's servers for a month.
Since the iCloud hack, Apple has stepped up its security measures through the enforcement of its two-factor authentication process on iTunes and iCloud. Apple, however, stated that the hack was not due to vulnerabilities in the iCloud service.
