Leaked private photos and videos: the law gives platforms 24 hours.

Do four things, in this order. First, do not contact the person who posted it and do not pay anyone demanding money — payment almost always leads to further demands, and it destroys the leverage you have. Second, preserve evidence: screenshot the page including the full URL and the visible date, and save the link itself. Do not delete anything from your own phone or accounts, even messages you are ashamed of, because they establish that the content was private and shared in confidence. Third, report it to the platform immediately through its own reporting route — that starts a statutory clock, which matters even if you engage us later. Fourth, contact us on +91-93547-47487. Our initial assessment on this category is within the hour, not within a working day. Nothing you tell us goes further, and an NDA is executed before any detailed case discussion.

The legal deadline is 24 hours. Rule 3(2)(b) of the IT (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021 requires an intermediary to remove or disable access to content within twenty-four hours of receiving a complaint from the affected individual, where the material exposes a private area, shows full or partial nudity, depicts a sexual act, or is impersonation in electronic form including artificially morphed images. This is the shortest removal timeline anywhere in Indian content law — an ordinary defamatory article carries a 36-hour clock and a court-order route that can run for weeks. Practically, compliant platforms and mainstream hosts act inside that window. Non-compliant and offshore hosts take longer and need escalation, which is why we run these as a sweep rather than a single notice.

Several apply at once, which is what makes this category enforceable. IT Rules 2021 Rule 3(2)(b) gives the 24-hour removal obligation. Section 66E of the IT Act 2000 makes capturing, publishing or transmitting images of a private area without consent punishable with up to three years imprisonment. Sections 67 and 67A of the IT Act cover publishing obscene and sexually explicit material electronically, with 67A carrying up to five years on first conviction. Under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023, voyeurism and stalking provisions apply to the person who captured or circulated the material. Where the content sits behind a search result, the Right to Be Forgotten and privacy jurisprudence supports de-indexing separately from removal at the host. You do not need all of these to succeed — you need the right one for each platform.

All of it is the objective, and it is the reason this work is handled as a sweep rather than as one notice. Leaked material mirrors quickly — a single video is typically reposted across aggregator sites, tube sites, file hosts, Telegram channels and sometimes a throwaway blog, each with a different host, jurisdiction and reporting route. We map the full spread first, including copies you have not found, and then work the whole set in parallel with the host, the CDN, the domain registrar and the search engines. Removing only the copy you know about is the most common mistake in this category, because the remaining mirrors re-seed the search results within days.

No. Removal under the IT Rules is a civil route and runs on a complaint from you as the affected individual, not on a police report. We can begin the same day without an FIR. That said, an FIR is often worth filing in parallel where you want the person responsible identified or prosecuted, and it strengthens escalation against a host that ignores the civil route. We will tell you plainly when we think an FIR helps your case and when it only adds delay and exposure. The decision stays yours.

Not through the removal route. Notices to platforms under Rule 3(2)(b) are made on your behalf by the partner law firm and are not published anywhere. Indian courts also restrict publication of the identity of victims in this category, and where proceedings are filed, anonymisation can be sought at the outset. The fear of being named is the single most common reason people leave this content up for months, and it is worth knowing that the fear is largely misplaced: the removal route is confidential by design. What we cannot control is a person who already knows and chooses to talk.

It strengthens your position rather than weakening it. Rule 3(2)(b) expressly covers impersonation in electronic form, "including artificially morphed images of such individual", so a deepfake or a face-swapped image falls inside the same 24-hour obligation as a genuine photograph. You do not have to prove the image is real to have it removed — and you should never feel obliged to discuss whether it is. In practice, morphed content is often easier to action, because the platform does not have to weigh a consent question.

Yes, and both are necessary. Removal at the host deletes the file; de-indexing removes the search result that leads people to it. If only the host acts, cached copies and the search listing can persist; if only Google acts, the content stays live for anyone with the link. We pursue both in parallel and verify each. Google additionally operates a dedicated removal route for non-consensual explicit imagery which does not require a court order, and we use it alongside the statutory notice rather than instead of it.

Offshore hosting slows things down but does not put the content out of reach. Indian rules bind any intermediary offering services in India, and the largest platforms comply regardless of where they are incorporated. For genuinely non-compliant offshore sites, the routes that work are the host and upstream provider rather than the site operator, the CDN in front of it, the domain registrar, payment processors where the site is commercial, and de-indexing so the material is no longer findable even while it remains live. We will tell you honestly at assessment which of your URLs sit in this harder category, before you pay anything.

Partly, and we will not overstate it. Telegram channels and bots can be reported and removed, and we do that, but the platform is slower and less consistent than mainstream hosts. WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, so no one can delete a message already sitting on someone else's phone. What can be done is removing the public distribution points that feed the private sharing — the channels, the links, the hosted files — so the material stops spreading and stops being findable. Anyone who promises to delete content from private phones is not being straight with you.

Yes, and you should start it today whether or not you engage anyone. Google operates a free removal request for non-consensual explicit imagery. Every major platform has a reporting route for this category, and those routes trigger the same statutory 24-hour clock we rely on. StopNCII.org lets adults create a digital hash of an image so participating platforms can block it being uploaded, without you ever sending the image itself. We tell every caller this before discussing fees. What we add is scale and escalation: finding the copies you cannot, running dozens of routes in parallel, and moving to notices under advocate signature and to court when a host ignores the free route. If your matter is one URL on one cooperative platform, say so and we will tell you to use the free route.

This category is quoted as a sweep rather than per URL, because the same file is typically mirrored across many hosts and a per-URL price would be both punitive and misleading. We map the full spread first and quote against it, so you know the number before committing. Standard published rates apply where the matter is genuinely a small number of URLs on mainstream platforms. Fees are payable in advance and are refunded in full for anything not removed within the timeline agreed for it — including where a host simply refuses, because that is our risk to carry rather than yours.

Re-uploading is normal in this category and the engagement is built around it rather than ending at the first takedown. Where the same URL reappears after a confirmed removal, we address it as a continuation at no additional charge. Where the material surfaces at a new URL, monitoring is what catches it — we watch the known spread and the search results for re-emergence and act on it rather than waiting for you to find it. Hash-based blocking through StopNCII is worth doing in parallel because it prevents some re-uploads from ever completing.

As few people as possible, and never more than the work requires. We do not need you to send us the content itself to begin — URLs are enough, and URLs are what we work from. Where the material must be reviewed to prepare a notice, it is handled by the case lead and the advocate at the partner law firm, under an NDA executed before any detailed discussion, and it is not circulated internally, stored on personal devices or used in any case study, testimonial or marketing material. You may ask us at any point to confirm in writing what we hold and to delete it.

Then it is not a reputation matter and we will not treat it as one. Sexual content involving a minor is child sexual abuse material, and the correct route is an immediate report to the police and to the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal at cybercrime.gov.in, which has a dedicated reporting category for it. Reporting is a legal obligation, not a choice, and it takes priority over any removal engagement. We will help you make that report and will pursue removal and de-indexing alongside it, but we will not accept an instruction to handle such content quietly instead of reporting it.