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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
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Actress Has Case Over IMDB-Reported Age

(CN) - A 41-year old actress who sued the Internet Movie Database for revealing her true age can continue with some of her claims, a federal judge in Washington ruled.

Huong Hoang, an actress professionally known as Junie Hoang, first sued IMDB.com and its parent company, Amazon, as a Jane Doe plaintiff, claiming she did not provide the website with her date of birth, but it revealed the truth anyway.

A judge ruled that "the injury she fears is not severe enough to justify permitting her to proceed anonymously," so Hoang amended the case with her real name.

Hoang's lawsuit accused the IMDB of using the information she gave it to "scour public records databases and other sources for purposes of discovering Plaintiff's date of birth," and claimed the site refused to take down her birth date.

By revealing her real age, Hoang says IMDB created a "double-whammy effect" where she "cannot get roles playing younger women, and because she looks so much younger than she actually is, [she] cannot physically portray the role of a forty-year-old woman."

Hoang's suit was for breach of contract, fraud, and violations of Washington's Consumer Protection and Privacy Acts.

In a 12-page order, U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman threw out Hoang's fraud and Privacy Act claims, but found merit to her breach of contract claim.

IMDB and Amazon failed to convince the court that it had permission to mine public records for Hoang's birth date under the website's subscriber agreement or privacy policy.

"Plaintiff's core factual allegation is that Defendants used her personal information provided for payment 'to cross-reference public records and other sources to obtain, among other things, Plaintiff's legal name, age, date of birth, and other personal, confidential information, and making some of that unlawfully-obtained confidential information available to the public,'" Pechman wrote.

"While this allegation does not contain specific factual information about how Defendants allegedly used her information to obtain her birth date, it is sufficient to provide the Defendants fair notice of the basis for Plaintiff's claims."

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