Google's Transparency Pipeline Exposes Sex Crime Victims' Data Globally
Google's transparency pipeline has exposed sensitive data of sex crime victims from multiple countries, including Korea, Brazil, Japan, Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, and Vietnam. The system, designed to document legal demands for content removal, inadvertently published private disclosures with identifying information intact.
The victims' requests to remove abuse content were transmitted to Project L, a public transparency archive affiliated with Harvard Law School, known as Lumen. Google had indicated it would not share sensitive data from digital sex crime removal requests, but the investigation found that these requests were transmitted and published with full names, student ID numbers, phone numbers, workplaces, and detailed descriptions of abuse.
Amanda Storey, VP for Trust and Safety at Google, described the exposure as an 'unintended disclosure of information' resulting from 'human error.' Google permanently deleted the exposed data relating to victims in Korea and halted transmission of new Korean removal notices to Lumen.
The total number of affected victims globally remains unknown, and Google has offered no public timeline for notifying those whose data was published. Korean authorities have launched a formal investigation into how victims' data was exposed through Google's removal process, and the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family and the Korea Communications Standards Commission pressed for deletion of 47 confirmed victim requests.