Google AI breaches New Zealand court name suppression orders
Google's AI search functions, including AI Overviews, revealed the identities of individuals protected by court-ordered name suppressions in New Zealand. The AI surfaced this information despite legal mandates intended to keep the identities confidential.
Google's AI search functions bypassed legal mandates by surfacing identities protected by court-ordered name suppressions.
Key facts
- What
- Google's AI search functions, including AI Overviews, revealed the identities of individuals protected by court-ordered name suppressions in New Zealand.
- Incident date
- Feb 17, 2025
- Who
- Failure mode
- Data Leakage
- AI surface
- Search / RAG
- Severity
- High
What happened
Google's AI search features, including AI Overviews, disclosed the names of individuals subject to court-ordered name suppression in New Zealand. This resulted in the public identification of people who were legally protected from being named. Google was subsequently asked to explain how its AI obtained the information and why it failed to respect the suppressions.
What broke inside the model
- 01 · TriggerA request triggers retrieval or context loading.
- 02 · Model stepThe context pulls in another user's content.
- 03 · Control gapNo boundary enforces isolation at the moment of output.
- 04 · FailurePrivate data crosses into the response.
- 05 · ConsequenceOne user sees another's data, and disclosure follows.
One user's content crosses the retrieval boundary into another's response.
The AI's retrieval and synthesis mechanism failed to implement a filtering layer for legally suppressed identities. It surfaced protected information from its training data or indexed web content without verifying the legal status of the names.
What it cost
Sources
- PressGoogle's AI has been breaching New Zealand court name suppressionsrnz.co.nz
- PressGoogle AI breaches New Zealand court name suppression ordersnzherald.co.nz
Cite this entry
https://failureindex.ai/failures/google-breaches-zealand-name-suppression-ordersAI Failure Index. "Google AI breaches New Zealand court name suppression orders" (FI-0395). Realm Labs. https://failureindex.ai/failures/google-breaches-zealand-name-suppression-orders (indexed Jun 10, 2026).Data fields CC-BY 4.0, prose citation permitted. Incident ID FI-0395. Full dataset at /data.
Note from Realm Labs, the Index steward
How Realm would have caught this
- Prism
- OmniGuard
- AI Detection & Response (AIDR)
Realm can detect when a response is about to emit data that falls outside the bounds of the current user and context, and block or redact it inline, at the moment of generation rather than after the data has left.