A Harlem woman is taking legal action to force search engines to remove her name from search results because of revenge porn published online by her ex. The New York Post reports that the woman, a 30-year-old college student, has an uncommon West African name, and that after she broke up with her boyfriend in late 2015, he posted sneakily recorded videos of them having sex to porn sites.
As a result, now when one searches the woman's name, more than four pages of porn-related search results come up, according to the suit. The woman's lawyer told the Post the situation has kept her from getting so much as an internship. In response, she is demanding that Google, Yahoo, and Bing permanently remove her name from their sites, a much more sweeping measure than asking the individual sites hosting the porn to take it down.
The request does not have a legal precedent in the U.S., but it echoes the 2014 European Court of Justice ruling creating the European Union's "right to be forgotten." The principle, allowing people to request the removal of inaccurate, old, and "no longer relevant or excessive" results, has already led to the censoring of several hundred thousand search results.
For now, the right to be forgotten only applies within the EU, meaning that Google makes results hidden to people accessing the internet from IP addresses in those countries. However, in 2015, the highest court in France ruled that Google must expand its censorship and hide the results from every computer in the world. Google is appealing the ruling, which in the U.S. would likely violate the First Amendment and chill publishing in all its forms.
As Slate reports, there are other ways that the idea behind the right to be forgotten is creeping into U.S. courts. In 2012, a Connecticut woman named Lorraine Martin sued several news organizations in an effort to force them to remove articles mentioning a marijuana arrest that she had had expunged after the charges were dropped. Martin lost the case, but the court avoided addressing the First Amendment issues raised by her suit.
Also, from Slate:
Alabama is currently contemplating a bill that would force websites to remove mug shots of arrestees who were later acquitted, and California has already passed a law that allows minors to compel websites to delete any content they posted when they were under 18.
The related issue of revenge porn, in which someone posts explicit images of another person out of spite, is also evolving in the law. In New York state, publishing revenge porn is not a crime, though hacking is, and copyright claims can be made by victims. A bill currently before the City Council would make uploading or disseminating pornographic images with the intent of harming the person in them a crime punishable by a $1,000 fine and up to a year in jail.
