There’s more legal trouble brewing for Google, as a victim of Jeffrey Epstein has filed a class action suit against the world’s largest search engine, alleging its AI Mode improperly published personal information about sex trafficking victims.
The problem began with the Department of Justice, whose rollout of the Epstein files, following the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act last year, was riddled with hasty redactions, which often protected the identities of alleged perpetrators while the identities of victims were left unconcealed.
The DOJ, however, has acknowledged the errors and removed the personal information from its website. The problem now lies with Google, and more specifically, its artificial intelligence, which trawled the initial, unredacted document dump and still hosts the sensitive personal information of sex trafficking victims.
“Even after the government acknowledged the disclosure violated the rights of survivors and withdrew the information, online entities like Google continuously republish it, refusing [the] victim’s pleas to take it down,” the lawsuit reads.
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The allegations don’t stop there. Not only did Google knowingly refuse to remove the sensitive information, which includes “full name, contact information, cities of residence, and association with Jeffrey Epstein,” but the AI also allegedly “generated a hypertext link allowing anyone to send direct email to Plaintiff with the click of a button.”
Worse still, for Google: the lawsuit alleges that other artificial intelligence companies did not improperly publish victim information: “Notably, several other publicly available AI tools that generate content by analyzing online sources, such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, provided no victim-related information whatsoever in similar repeated testing.”
This latest lawsuit comes on the heels of a damning Los Angeles jury ruling that found both Meta and Google-owned YouTube liable for “designing products that addict and harm children,” prioritizing online engagement over the well-being of their users.
At the time of writing, Google has not issued a public statement on the lawsuit, but a verdict in this trial could set important precedents for privacy protections in the age of AI, with implications that would ripple across the tech landscape.
