Revenge porn victim to Google: Make me disappear

A college student is asking a Manhattan court to take an unprecedented measure: Order Google, Yahoo and Bing to permanently delete her full name from their internet search engines over revenge porn posted by an ex-boyfriend.

The Harlem woman — whose unique West African name is four words long — broke up with her boyfriend in November 2015 following a three-month relationship, the suit says.

Angry that he’d been dumped, he published surreptitiously recorded sex tapes on X-rated websites, according to court papers.

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.

More than four pages of X-rated references to the woman still come up whenever her name is entered in search engines.

The filthy search results mean that the Harlem resident can’t get a job and her reputation has suffered, the suit says.

“If you Google her name, everything is right there,” her attorney, Ryanne Konan, told The Post.

“She can’t even get an internship.”

The women is seeking an injunction from the court that would force the search engines to “remove her full name from their search engines,” according to court papers.

Experts say the demand is a first-of-its-kind case.

“Removing someone’s name entirely from a search engine? I’ve never heard of that being done before,” said Darius Maxwell Fisher, head of the reputation management firm Status Labs.

But the digital landscape is slightly more amenable to reputation cleanups across the Atlantic.

In 2014, the European Court of Justice made what’s come to be known as the “right to be forgotten” ruling, which allows residents of the European Union to ask that inaccurate, old or irrelevant personal information be deleted from search results.

Information that infringes on privacy can also be requested removed. Those removals are made on a case-by-case basis.

In the Manhattan case, the woman would rather have her identity erased from the web for eternity, than have her name associated with the ultra-raunchy postings that currently turn up for her name, her lawyer said.

“It’s causes more damage than good,” Konan said.

The woman declined a request for an interview. Konan said his client reported the ex-boyfriend to cops, but he was never charged. Unlike the majority of states, New York does not have a law against non-consensual sex video and photograph postings, known as “revenge porn.”

Konan acknowledges that there is no precedent for the legal action he’s seeking.

“I don’t need any precedent. It’s her name, it belongs to her. She has a right to her name,” the lawyer argued.

But Aaron Minc, an attorney specializing in online reputation defense, disagreed.

“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.

He said that while he’s sympathetic to the victim’s plight, the federal Communications Decency Act protects search engines from liability over content posted by third parties.

Instead of suing, Minc recommended the victim ask the search engines to “de-index” her name from the porn sites.

“Google is never going to comply because there could be another person born tomorrow who’s given the same name,” he said, adding that search engines “are never going to de-index a word or phrase.”

Spokesmen for Google and Bing did not respond to requests for comment. Yahoo declined to comment.

All three companies have dedicated pages where victims can report non-consensual pornography and ask that it be removed from search results.

Konan claims he’s asked the sites for help, but they’ve ignored him, so he sued.

“I wanted Google to know that we were serious,” he said.

Fisher said he expects the search engines will win because they already provide the public with a mechanism to have revenge porn removed.

“I don’t think this case is going to result in a ruling that sets us off in a totally different direction,” Fisher said.

While it may be a stretch, the suit is timely.

Producer Cynthia Lowen has a feature documentary film in the works called “Netizens” about women like Konan’s client who are victims of online sexual harassment.

Lowen wrote an article in Fortune magazine last month about a 46-year-old commodities trader named Tina whose career has been destroyed by a vengeful ex’s postings claiming she was a prostitute. They even led readers to Tina’s LinkedIn profile.

“It’s like someone has taken my identity,” Tina told Lowen.

New York Post 

(34)