LRN No.50: the Google alert nobody wants

I hope this gets through your spam filters

I have a Google alert in my name. Whenever something saying “Jenny Kleeman” appears on a major website, Google sends me an email to let me know about it. It’s not because of narcissism (I promise). It means I get notified whenever there’s a new book review, or when my radio programmes are listed in the official schedules, or when an article of mine goes live. Or when I appear on porn sites.

The first time I got that kind of alert was last September. I was on a long weekend away in France with my best friend. I woke up, checked my email on my phone, and there it was: a notification telling me my name had appeared on a website with far too many XXXs in the url. A website popular enough for Google to email me about it.

I sat up, blinking at the url. The only way anyone could have pornographic images of me would be if they deepfaked them. I have written a fair bit about dystopian technology and sex. Might someone have actually deepfaked me? Me? I hovered over the link, knowing that I was definitely going to click on it, but not wanting to see where it led to.

And when I eventually did, I saw an image of my author photo - the one from my Audible profile - on an iPad, on a table, with someone’s erect penis in front of it.

So I laughed. Partly out of relief that I hadn’t been deepfaked, but mostly at just how pathetic it was. The text underneath made clear that this was a custom; the penis did not belong to whoever had commissioned and uploaded the photograph. What kind of person does this? Wants this? Has a kink for authors in their forties that is satisfied by this? It was ridiculous. So I laughed.

But then I stopped laughing. It wasn’t very nice to have my name and image on this site, even in an absurd capacity. And when, over the coming weeks and months, I started to get alerts all the time letting me know that the same picture had been posted on other websites, it wasn’t funny at all. Particularly because I know there is nothing I can do about it.

I learned enough from writing about so-called revenge porn to be aware that there are no legal grounds to demand that this image is taken down. I’d only have real power to do this if my copyright was being infringed. Even though my face is in it, I don’t own the copyright to this picture - the person who took the photograph does. I don’t even own the copyright to my author picture - that belongs to the photographer Jenny Smith.

Even though it’s a horrible image that’s arguably humiliating for me, it doesn’t break the law that’s supposed to criminalise revenge porn because it does not involve a private sexual image of me. Plus, the people who run websites like this don’t tend to respond to complaints, if you manage to be canny enough to find a contact address for them.

So there it stays. And every time a new Google alert lands in my inbox, my heart sinks. We live in a ridiculous world.

Things that have caught my eyes and ears:

• am loving Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s extraordinary memoir of her time working at the heart of Facebook. A compelling, daring, jaw-dropping book

• laughed and cried in equal measure at Archie Bland’s incredibly moving piece about the near death and changed life of his baby son

• felt very lucky that I got to host an evening with Jefferson Fisher for Intelligence Squared earlier this week. Six million people follow Jefferson’s communication tips on Instagram, but he has never left the USA before. His mind was blown to see how many people follow his advice in the UK

• adored Jerrod Carmichael’s comedy special, Don’t Be Gay. Properly funny stand up (that will not be to everyone’s taste, just as it should be).