The Delhi High Court orders Microsoft and Google to present a case review before a lone judge in the non-consensual intimate photographs case

On Thursday, the Delhi High Court requested that Microsoft and Google, two of the largest tech companies, look into the decision of a single-judge bench that ordered search engines to take proactive measures to remove non-consensual intimate pictures (NCII) off the internet without needing particular URLs.

The corporations said that the imposition of such mandates goes beyond the current legal framework and is not practicable technologically.

Acting Chief Justice Manmohan and Justice Manmeet Pritam Singh Arora, who sit on a division bench, emphasized the need to provide the lone judge with information via a review procedure.

It also guaranteed that Microsoft and Google may file further appeals if they are still not happy with the ruling of the lone judge.

In addition, the bench gave two weeks to file the review, emphasizing that submission delays would not result in rejection.

Google and Microsoft’s senior lawyers, Arvind Nigam and Jayant Mehta, respectively, said that the sole judge’s orders went beyond what their existing technology could do. They argued about the difficulty of putting policies into place that go beyond what they can already do, especially when it comes to automatically detecting and eliminating information that lacks specific URLs.

Although technology is changing, according to both attorneys, the search engines’ current features do not comply with the court’s orders. They said that while there are continuous attempts to improve technology, it is still not flawless.

Microsoft and Google have filed appeals against a ruling rendered on April 26 by Justice Subramonium Prasad.

Justice Prasad had warned social media companies that if they don’t follow the Information Technology Rules’ deadlines for deleting personal, non-consensual information, they might lose their liability protection.

According to what he had indicated, search engines have the technology to take down NCII information without victims having to keep asking the court to get involved. They also can’t say they are unable to take down or block links that lead to unlawful content.

It was contended that since Microsoft’s search engine Bing does not contain any material, the solitary judge’s reliance on Meta’s mechanism for content removal was incorrect.

Mehta had argued that, given the limits of existing technology, it is not possible to comply with the court’s order to proactively look for and delete such information across the database. Additionally, he made the point that using artificial intelligence (AI) tools to carry out the instructions would be unworkable since AI would find it difficult to distinguish between pictures that are consensual and those that are not.