A person walks by the Google logo at an event at the Paris Google Lab on the sidelines of the AI Action Summit in Paris, on Feb. 9, 2025. (AP/Yonhap)
Korea was not the only country where victims who sent Google removal requests about illegally obtained sexual images ended up having their private information posted online, the Hankyoreh has confirmed.“Photos of me from when I was a minor were distributed without my consent. They were posted on an adult website, but I was 13 or 14 at the time. If you search Google for ‘[my name] nude,’ they come up,” wrote a Brazilian national.This was just one of many such requests — not only in English but also in Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese — that were posted publicly on the website of a Google partner identified here as “Project L.”Google has maintained that it has a firm policy against sharing sensitive information with Project L when processing requests to remove content related to digital sex crimes, and that the disclosures resulted from “human error.” The scale of the latest revelations, however, has prompted criticism that the incident amounted to a system failure on a global scale.
A removal request submitted to Google that was publicly accessible on the website of “Project L.”
