Google Exposed Sex Crime Victims’ Removal Requests Worldwide

Google reportedly exposed identifying information from victims’ requests to remove illegally obtained sexual images, affecting people in multiple countries rather than only South Korea. The Hankyoreh confirmed that requests written in English, Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese were published on the website of a Google partner referred to as “Project L”.

One request came from a Brazilian national who said intimate photographs taken when they were 13 or 14 had been distributed without consent and appeared in search results.

Google has said it had a firm policy against sharing sensitive information with Project L when handling removal requests linked to digital sex crimes, and attributed the disclosures to “human error”. However, the number of cases has prompted criticism that the incident represented a global system failure rather than isolated mistakes. The supplied report does not give a total number of affected victims or specify the full range of countries involved.

Following the Hankyoreh’s reporting and protests by the South Korean government, Google issued a statement in Korean on Wednesday, signed by Amanda Storey, its vice-president of trust and safety. Google said it had “permanently deleted the exposed data relating to victims in Korea” and had “completely halted the transmission of all new legal takedown requests to [Project L]”. The report does not say whether equivalent deletion or suspension measures were applied to victims in other countries.