: Google reveals anonymous blogger’s identity
Last week I posted about the unprecedented court ruling in the US in which Google was ordered to reveal the identity of an anonymous blogger, something of importance to all bloggers.
A reminder – model Liskula Cohen wanted to sue the anonymous blogger for defamation after derogatory posts were published. She sued Google to force them to reveal the name of the blogger and the court ruled in her favour.
I said at the end of the post: Whether Google will appeal the decision hasn’t been announced, nor has how or when the bloggers name will be revealed. I guess it could be in open court or privately to Ms Cohen and her lawyers.
In fact Google simply obeyed the court order. It’s reported that the blogger’s identity was initially concealed, but somehow it’s now in the public domain.
The outed blogger is Rosemary Port, a 29-year-old New York fashion student.
The story will run for a while yet because she says she’s planning to sue Google for breaching her privacy.
Talk about naive: “Before her suit, there were probably two hits on my website: one from me looking at it, and one from her looking at it,” Port said.
“That was before it became a spectacle. I feel my right to privacy has been violated.”
Rosemary, you publish something on the web and it’s there for the whole world to see. You want your written thoughts to remain private, write it with a pen in an old-fashioned paper diary and lock it in a cupboard.
When you read the new details it’s a case of two women being bitchy to each other which has got out of hand.
Now the lawyers are involved, offering them huge publicity, not to mention a good percentage of any damages awarded, it will just go on and on.
Mr Murdoch’s rag the New York Daily News has been running the story and it’ll be fodder for the tabloids for a long time yet. The gossip angle will probably throw a smoke screen over the serious aspect of it all.
I read the latest chapter of the story in The Sydney Morning Herald, which rightly puts it in the Technology section.
