Revenge on the Internet

Let's talk about revenge. The dictionary defines revenge as: action taken in return for an injury or offense. Okay, so basically, revenge means that you DO something in order to 'get back' at someone you think has hurt you. We all have probably had feelings or desire for revenge when we feel we've been wronged, but the truth is, if we've been hurt, hurting someone else rarely gives us the pleasure or satisfaction necessary to make our own hurt go away.

Yet, revenge happens, every day, and usually, the vengeful person either regrets the act of revenge, or eventually, they move past the hurt of the wrong done to them and move on with their lives, revenge all but forgotten.

Now, with the internet, we know that pretty much everything on the internet is permanent, in some way. If you post a blog, a picture, a comment, a website, or any other type of visual media on the internet, not only is it there and available for everyone to see, but it also can be copied, shared, forwarded, printed…etc.

So let's bring the two together: revenge and the internet.

What you end up with are sites like: www.revengeworld.com.

I was given the link to this website by a friend of mine, who found the information contained on the site highly amusing. Then another friend of mine admitted that he frequented the site too, in search of naked pictures posted for revenge. Between the two of them, I decided this site warranted further inspection.

So I clicked on the link and was immediately taken to the front page, where there is a lengthy Terms of Services window you must agree to in order to proceed. As I took the time to read through the TOS, I was disturbed by a couple of things I found there.

First, here is what one section of the TOS says:

By posting or submitting content to this site, you:

1.) Grant Revenge World and its affiliates and licensees the world-wide, royalty free, irrevocable, non-exclusive, and fully sublicensable right and license to use, reproduce, display, perform, adapt, modify, alter, distribute, have distributed, and promote the content in any form, anywhere and for any purpose

Okay, why is this disturbing? Well, basically, because if you post anything, anything at all, to this site, whether it's a comment, story, picture, your name, anything - Revenge World owns it, not you. It also means they can do just about anything they want to with it, without your permission, and can even sell it to someone else, also without your permission and/or knowledge.

Hum, you really dislike your ex girlfriend, you caught her making out with another guy while you were dating, so you take the pictures you took of her while in the shower, post them on Revenge World, and then what? I mean, I'm not saying that they sell those pictures to porn sites, but this clause in their TOS says they can, and you can't do much about it. So next week, your girlfriend, who you only wanted to tick off a little for cheating on you, now appears on about 500 amateur porn sites, and she doesn't even know it. I'm not saying it does happen, but it could.

2. warrant and represent that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content and that public posting and use of your content by Revenge World will not infringe or violate the rights of any third party.

I'm curious… if I take a picture, I have the rights to that picture, but what of the subject of that picture? Does the person in the picture have a right? I ran into this recently with my ex, when his new fling decided to post a picture of him that I had taken, giving me copyrights to that photo, on her website without my permission. Of course, the picture was of my ex, so did he have the right as the subject of the picture to grant her permission to post it, or do I have the right to grant permission as the one who technically holds the copyright?

My research could not find a definitive answer to these questions, so it's one that I'm sure the courts would have to figure out if it ever came to that, which in my case, it won't. But if someone were to post pictures of me on the internet, without my permission, even if they were the ones who owned the camera, took the picture, and have the photos, I would still say that in my opinion, posting my picture without my permission infringes upon my rights. What right that is, I am still researching, but there has to be some legal precedent for this somewhere.

The rest of the TOS agreement on Revenge World's site is mostly a bunch of legal mumbo jumbo intended to protect Revenge World from lawsuits. However, the more I read them, the more it became clear that the TOS only applies to the people who sign up and actually post on the site. What of the innocent (or in this case perhaps not so innocent, but still non-involved) people who are the subject of the posts and possible pictures posted on Revenge World?

You see, if I go to Revenge World and agree to the TOS and post something there, I am bound by the TOS I agreed to, but what if I were to post a picture of you? You never agreed to the TOS, so are you bound by this? Can you not sue Revenge World for the damages, since you never agreed to the TOS and your picture was posted without permission? Ah, but then there's the catch. YOU can't go to Revenge World to view your photo to verify that it is there without agreeing to the TOS. Nice protection for Revenge World, no?

Immediately below the TOS, it read that I had to be 18 to enter.

Okay, so these were my thoughts as I entered the site, but since I was not going to post anything, I went ahead and agreed to the terms and entered.

Well, I immediately understood why you had to be 18 to enter this site. The very first thing I was treated to upon entering Revenge World was a picture of… well, you'll just have to go there yourself to see, but let's just say that it was not something that could be shown on cable television, even if it were after prime time, and the first advertisement on the site, a banner ad, held the title: PornPimps.

Okay, the next thing that I noticed is that the site tracks IP addresses. No, nowhere in the TOS did I read that they would be doing that. How do I know this? Well, two ways. First, the advertisements that I found on the site were to the city in which I live. I don't live in a big city that would accidentally pop up, but rather a small town in the middle of the desert of west Texas. Which means that not only did they track my IP, but they also do a search on it to see where I pinged.

The second way I know they did this was because, AFTER I entered the site, I was able to read their privacy policy. At the bottom of the page, you can click on that and here is what it said about the information they gathered from people on their site:

• 
  
• Click-stream data
  
• 
  
• HTTP protocol elements
  
• 
  
• User's interaction with a page or resource
  
• 
  
• Search terms
  
• 
  
• Transaction history
  
• 
  
• Navigation and click-stream data
  
• 
  
• HTTP cookies
  
• 
  
• User information
  
• 
  
• Physical contact information
  
• 
  
• Online contact information
  
• 
  
• Unique identifiers
  
• 
  
• Purchase information
  
• 
  
• Financial information
  
• 
  
• Demographic data
  
• 
  
• Content
  
• 
  
• Preference data
  
• 
  

Hum, I'm not sure I'm all that comfortable with them collecting all that data about my time on Revenge World. I must admit, I'm awfully curious about just exactly what that data will be used for, so I continued reading, and it told me. One of the last things on the list was: telemarketing and contacting site visitors. Not good!

The navigation bar allowed me to click on a link to "Submit Revenge," but it told me I had to register in order to do that. After reading the TOS and privacy policy, I decided that for the purposes of this website review, I would not be registering to submit anything.

Moving right along, the next tab on the navigation bar for Revenge World read: ABJECT PLEASURES. I must admit, that got my attention, so let's click on it and see what we get. What I was treated to was a view of what appears to be a blog of someone named Jason, along with some pictures that are clearly pornographic in nature. Honestly, I had not been informed that this was a pornographic site, but after viewing it, I must say that I've seen less raunchy pictures on actual porn sites than what I saw here (not that *I* EVER visit porn sites.)

The next link on the navigation bar was "View Females." I clicked that link and was taken to a listing of several 'stories' posted by people, along with naked pictures of the women who were the subject of the stories. You could then click on any of the pictures or story titles and be taken to the text of the story and a place where you can view additional pictures. It appears that after the story, you can then view or make a comment about the picture, about the story, or about anything else that you might want to comment about.

The link for "View Males" was much the same, only it seems women truly can write much more vivid descriptions and stories than the men can.

The next few links, one entitled, "View Smut," pretty much confirmed what I already knew now, that this site is nothing more than an amateur porn site, using the guise of revenge as a premise to draw people in, which seems to work, since there are currently over 10,000 stories and even more pictures posted, and the comments range well over 200 per post on the more popular ones.

Now, after reading some of the stories and viewing many of the pictures, I have a couple of questions. 1) Are these for real? and 2) Why would people want to do this?

Unfortunately, I'll probably never truly know the answer to either of those questions, but what I do know now is that this site is most definitely pornographic in nature, and not at all what I thought it was going to be. The advertising is all very adult oriented and I found in my research not a single posted picture where the party subject to the revenge was fully clothed.

Now, my next question that would come to mind is: why haven't they been sued yet?

So I decided to do some research on that too.

First, I looked for a place where one could file a complaint if their picture had been posted on the site without their permission. I found a link at the bottom of each page, in the same place where the privacy notice is found, called: Removal.

I clicked that link and it took me to a page that had instructions for requesting a picture be removed. The first part said that you could request removal if you felt that your rights had been violated by something posted on this site. Here is what it said:

The Request for Removal must include all of the following:

• Identification of the right that you claim has been violated;
  
• 
  
• A description of the material that you claim should be removed;
  
• 
  
• A clear description of where the material is located on our web site, including its URL, so that we can locate the material;
  
• 
  
• Your address, telephone number, and e-mail address; and
  
• 
  
• A statement by you that you agree to provide Revenge World with any additional information or proof that we reasonably request.
  
• 
  

And that's pretty much all it says. There is no indication of how long it will take to review the request, how quickly they will act upon the request, what criteria must be met specifically to have the material removed… nothing. In addition, it does not address the previous statement that they can sell or distribute these photos without further consent, so there's not telling where they may have already used your photo that they don't have to remove.

So basically, someone posts naked pictures of you on this site without your permission, and in order to have that picture removed, you must reveal to Revenge World your full legal name, proof that a right of yours has been violated, your full address, telephone number and other contact information, and a statement that you'll give them more information if they want it.

Hum, I'm not feeling too good about Revenge World right about now.

So what about lawsuits? I mean, it appears that anyone can post just about anything here on this site that they want, with or without the other party's permission, and the other party has to do a song and dance just to have the request to remove it considered, much less approved, and in the meantime, there's no telling how many people have seen the photos by that time.

To make matters worse, I was unable with just a cursory search to determine exactly who owns Revenge World, and the only means of contact I found was through a web form, on the site itself, and a few email addresses for if there was a problem. The registrant information for the domain was not readily available and they are not self-hosted.

In all honesty, they probably feel pretty safe knowing that the typical woman or man who would have naked pictures of themselves floating around, and who would also choose to date or associate with the type of person who would then post those pictures on the internet as revenge, are probably not the type of people who would be willing to or even know how to go about filing a lawsuit against them. The few who might be knowledgeable enough, and have the money and time to pursue a lawsuit of this nature would probably be too embarrassed to do so.

Which brings me back to the wondering if this is legitimate or not. Are the pictures really real people or are they fabricated amateur porn in disguise? This brought me back to talking to my friend who initially gave me a link who claims that a friend of a friend once told her that she had indeed posted pictures on this site for revenge. I wonder.

In the end, this site is not at all what I expected, and parents, a word of warning - while it does not advertise itself as a pornographic site, it most definitely is pornographic, extremely pornographic, in addition to being full of adult content, language, and situations. If you hear of your kids going here, know that this is the case, and shut that down quickly.

For the rest of you adults out there, I'd caution you to think long and hard before you decide to take the step to permanently and publicly seek this type of revenge on any site of this nature. Remember, while Revenge World might have a ton of legal disclaimers to protect them, you don't.

Additionally, consider what you will really get out of seeking revenge… because once the damage is done, this type of revenge, even though you can later remove the photos and posts, is still the type of revenge you simply cannot take back.