Some people have a lot of chutzpah. They do something they should have known better not to do. They get caught. Then, instead of owning up to the event, taking it like an adult, apologizing and moving on, they get stupid, look for a scapegoat, and act as if they never did anything wrong to begin with.
Such is the follow up to the post I wrote a couple of days ago when I talked about a blogger who hid behind a fake name and pretty much slandered this model. Through a court order, Google gave up the email address, the model learned who it was and talked to the woman, and all should have been over at that point.
Instead, said “slanderer”, named Rosemary Port, decided that not only was she wronged by Google for giving out her email address, but she’s now going to try to sue Google for $15 million dollars for violating her privacy in responding to that court order.Okay, the obviously stupidity of the lawsuit aside, can anyone tell me what this woman is thinking, other than she wants her own little bit of publicity now? She stated that her original post only had two visitors before Liskula Cohen, the model she decided to slander, decided to sue to find out who she was. She’s trying to say that Cohen pretty much made a big deal of this, and in fact is the one who violated her privacy with the original lawsuit.
Oh come on now! This is beyond a pot calling a kettle black. This is definitely not taking any responsibility for one’s actions; can anyone say “clueless?” Google has never told anyone that they would have absolute privacy in using Blogger or anything else. We all have heard where, with a court order, Google will release search records of people being investigated by the police or other law enforcement groups. What makes this woman think she deserves any more immunity for what she did than what some of these other people have done?
Of course, there are some free speech advocates who believe this is the start of something bad. They say that, in many circumstances, people deserve to have their anonymity protected, so the rest of us can get information we might not otherwise get. I don’t dispute that, as I wrote elsewhere about someone who lost her job after being as a community blogger, a move I disagreed with because the woman hadn’t written anything disparaging, as far as I could see, about the company she was working for. The sensibilities of companies these days, who feel they have the right to control what workers do outside the workplace as much as within the workplace, is a slippery slope that people balance every day. In my previous post I talked about my own belief in privacy issues, which our friend Sire disagreed with and ended up writing a post on drug testing that’s gotten some very interesting responses both pro and con. It sometimes seems as if we’re moving in a direction where the divide between privacy and doing what’s right is getting wider.
Anyway, I don’t see this woman’s lawsuit going any further than being allowed to file it. She’s having her 15 minutes of fame right now, and she’s the only one responsible for it. If I were Cohen, with this latest move, I’d sue her for slander and defamation just to make a point. But I’m like that; what are your thoughts?
