Request for Question Clarification by
aceresearcher-ga
on
02 Jun 2004 19:03 PDT
Hi, blue!
I'm glad that the Editors removed your previous Question, since you
had posted personally identifying information in it -- and also
because I feel that anyone who tries to post an Answer to your
particular Question will simply be taking your money.
However, I had posted what I believe is a helpful Comment shortly
before it was removed, and I doubted that you got to read it, so I'm
posting it again here in the hope that it will give you some peace of
mind so that you can move on with your life.
<<Question: my name all over the internet
I searched for my name on the internet and was SHOCKED to find 33,000
hits. All related to a porn queen. I suspect that someone angry with
me has done this. I don't believe such a porn actress exists. How can
I find out or at least clean up the mess ? Are these results returned
because of the way I am logged onto my computer ? >>
The good news is that those 33,000 pages are ***NOT*** the result of
someone attempting to smear your name, and this has nothing to do with
the way you are logged in to your computer.
I am sorry to break the bad news to you, but there is indeed an
actress with the same name as yours. She specializes in horror movies,
but many of these also contain rather sexually explicit scenes. You
can look her up by plugging your name in the format
Lastname, Firstname
in the Internet Movie DataBase (imDb):
http://www.imdb.com
Your options include:
1) E-mailing, calling or writing to each of these sites and requesting
that they remove the reference which includes your name.
------------------------------------------------------
Your chances of persuading these sites to do this range from slim to none:
- Porn is *BIG* business on the Internet, and many sites manipulate
images of even mainstream actresses to turn them into porn.
- Notifying 33,000 websites would be next to impossible; you could
spend decades doing this, and while you were doing so, more sites with
the name would pop up; or at the very least, you would probably have
to expend a great deal of money to notify all of these sites within a
reasonable time span, and then deal with any responses you get.
- These websites would have no obligation to honor your request, since
you would have no legal basis for proving that their publication of
the name involved a deliberate attempt to smear you (the vast majority
of these sites aren't referring to *you* at all, but to some other
person!) Websites hosted by companies in countries outside of the USA
are notoriously impervious to any legal actions taken here, anyway.
- Furthermore, even if you were successful in getting many sites to
remove the name, the actress would likely take legal action to stop
you from doing so -- after all, her name and the publicity she gets
with it are how she makes a living.
2) Legally changing your own name.
------------------------------------------------------
You could do this, but this would be confusing and difficult for
everyone who knows you or wants to locate you; never mind the fact
that any professional business or social reputation you have built
under your name would be lost.
3) Ignore the whole thing.
------------------------------------------------------
You don't say how old you are, but you've apparently gotten this far
without anyone ever mentioning the existence of an actress with the
same name as yours. While this situation is terribly scandalous to
you, it's likely that none of the people you know -- about whose
opinion you care -- are even aware of anyone else with the same name.
Option 3 would be my **wholehearted** personal recommendation. If your
name was Monica Lewinsky, I could see why you might want to legally
change it to something else. But I think that the actress with your
name is flying so far below most people's radar, that it is pointless
for you to worry about all the websites which mention her.
Life is too short -- if you spend your time making a good life for
yourself, doing the things that you enjoy, spending time with your
friends and family, the fact that there's some B-grade actress out
there with the same name will not matter. The people about whom you
care are all going to know that you and she are not the same person.
If you are interested in trying to find what information about YOU
exists on the Internet, I've created a couple of searches that have
narrowed the results down to a list of less than 500 and less than 50,
respectively:
(replace Firstname Lastname with your Firstname Lastname)
"Firstname Lastname" -porn -film -films -celebrity -celebrities -video
-movie -movies
://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=%22firstname+lastname%22+-porn+-film+-films+-celebrity+-celebrities+-video+-movie+-movies
(replace Lastname Firstname with your Lastname Firstname)
"Lastname, Firstname" -porn -film -films -celebrity -celebrities
-video -movie -movies
://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=%22Lastname%2C+Firstname%22+-porn+-film+-films+-celebrity+-celebrities+-video+-movie+-movies
Once you get over this initial shock and see that your life is still
going on as usual, I hope that you'll agree that this is not an issue
on which you want to spend any of your time, effort, and worry.
Best Wishes,
aceresearcher
