A terrific NY Post op/ed by attorney Carrie Goldberg concerning Google’s complicity in revenge porn tragedies brings to mind the havoc wreaked by certain sites that shall remain nameless. Google search results (and the Google cache even after the offending postings were deleted) represent the driving force of such platforms, as well as the vector of its victims’ grief. This is, of course, by design, with the knowledge that Google would do little or nothing to mitigate the damage done. Ms. Goldberg is a hero and let’s hope that the right people heed her words.
‘Google knew these women had been tricked, held captive, sexually assaulted and humiliated … but corporate interest dictated total indifference’
I’m a lawyer who fights for victims of online harassment, sexual assault and blackmail. When I first started my Brooklyn firm five years ago, I was known as “the revenge-porn lawyer,” and indeed many of my clients were young women whose naked pictures had been posted on the Internet without their consent for the world to see.
My clients — nurses, students, teachers, moms, lawyers, dominatrices, celebrities — suffered horribly from their most intimate pictures being shared publicly. In my book, “Nobody’s Victim,” I discuss stories of my clients who were humiliated, harassed and stalked online by people who viewed nonconsensual material and photos of them on the Internet. Without exception, my clients’ No. 1 urgency was always the same — their horrific Google results!
At this point in time, nobody accepts a date, new hire, roommate or even college applicant without first doing a Google search. Google, with its 5.6 billion searches a day and ownership of 92.19 percent of the search-engine market share worldwide, enjoys a virtual monopoly on all of our reputations. It used to be that our reputations developed organically and locally through firsthand encounters and normal word-of-mouth gossip. Now Google’s PageRank algorithms determine what — and how much — people around the world know about us.
More at NY Post
Carrie Goldberg owns victims’ rights law firm C. A. Goldberg, PLLC and is the author of “Nobody’s Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls” (Penguin Random House).
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She represents Jane Doe 10 in the Girlsdoporn lawsuit.