A revenge porn victim has asked a Manhattan court to order her name removed from the Internet’s top search engine results, after the woman cited reputation damage and the inability to get a job.
After the woman broke up with her boyfriend in 2015, he allegedly resorted to posting recorded sex-tapes of the two to numerous pornographic websites as an act of revenge. She now wants Google, Yahoo, and Bing to remove her name from their search engines.
“The 30-year-old woman was horrified and asked the sites to remove the videos. They complied, but her online nightmare had already gone viral,” reported the New York Post. “More than four pages of X-rated references to the woman still come up whenever her name is entered in search engines.”
The woman’s unique name also reportedly means that search results easily direct to her.
“If you Google her name, everything is right there,” claimed her attorney Ryanne Konan, who is also currently suing Google. “She can’t even get an internship.”
“I don’t need any precedent,” he continued. “It’s her name, it belongs to her. She has a right to her name.”
Online reputation defense attorney Aaron Minc, however, claims that Konan and his client will never be able to achieve getting the woman’s name erased from every search engine.
“Her name is public. I don’t think you have an exclusive right to your name — that sounds like B.S. to me,” said Minc. “Google is never going to comply because there could be another person born tomorrow who’s given the same name.”
Minc continued to claim that search engines “are never going to de-index a word or phrase” and recommended that they de-index porn related to the name instead.
Minc’s skepticism was also mirrored by Darius Maxwell Fisher, the head of “reputation management firm” Status Labs.
“Removing someone’s name entirely from a search engine?” asked Fisher. “I’ve never heard of that being done before.”
Though the woman reported her ex-boyfriend to the police for allegedly posting their private sex-tapes online without permission, New York state does not currently have any laws against revenge porn, and he reportedly remains uncharged.
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook.
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