That Anonymous Coward sends in the news that the anonymous actress who sued IMDB for revealing her age is now, officially, no longer anonymous. Late last month, the actress was told that she would have to reveal her name in order to pursue her case against IMDB, and it appears that being anonymous and of an indeterminate age is less appealing than being 40 and Google-able, but with the possibility of a large payout in your future.

Huong Hoang is the actress who sued claiming the Internet search database had violated her right of privacy and opened her up to rampant age discrimination in Hollywood by telling everyone she's 40 years old. She says in an amended complaint filed today in Washington that she typically goes by her Americanized stage name, Junie Hoang, because her Asian name is difficult to pronounce and has led to discrimination in Hollywood.

Junie Hoang has amended her complaint and is proceeding with her lawsuit, holding IMDB and Amazon responsible for the damage done to her career by revealing her age, allegedly by pulling the information from her credit card. Of course, all the information she wished to keep hidden is now public knowledge, but on the Pyrrhic-esque bright side, this situation may allow her to increase the potential damages claimed. After all, everybody knows now, including the people who only thought they knew and the people who knew it wasn't Lucy Liu but secretly hoped it was. (That might just be me.)

But you know who knew before anyone else? An unregistered Techdirt reader commenting under the name "Paul." That Anonymous Coward also pointed out in his submission that Paul (real name unknown) nailed it, with a short, Holmesian blast of logic:

Junie Hoang seems more likely as her resume lists her as 26-33 and her bio lists her year of birth as 1971.

So, pre-SOPA internet kudos to both Paul for his prescience, and TAC for remembering everything that has happened on Techdirt ever. Now, for your viewing pleasure, I present to you Junie Hoang, appearing as herself on Penn & Teller's Bullshit!. Starting at 8:09, Hoang appears onscreen in a bathing suit and shortly thereafter, has a toilet plunger applied to her. The clip would be totally Safe For Work, if only Penn Jillette didn't swear like a ponytailed sailor.

Eric Goldman pointed us to a bizarre legal complaint against Amazon.com by an anonymous actress. Her complaint? That Amazon's IMDB movie info site put her real age on her profile page. She claims that she never gave Amazon that info directly, but that it pulled the info from her credit card file, which she used to sign up for a "pro" IMDB account.

In Plaintiff’s case, Defendants were able to and did access Plaintiff’s personal and credit card information by intercepting and recording her confidential electronic communications without or beyond her consent, further using that information 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 at www.imdb.com and other affiliated and unaffiliated websites.

By this practice, Defendants committed fraud, breached the terms of the Subscriber Agreement and Privacy Policy entered into with Plaintiff, and violated Plaintiff’s statutory privacy and consumer protection rights as described herein. Plaintiff brings this action seeking declaratory, injunctive and monetary relief to redress Defendants’ unlawful conduct.

All of this... because she didn't want her age identified on her IMDB page. The details behind all of this is that the actress is apparently Asian American, but does not use her real name for acting. Instead, she uses an Americanized name, and claims that she has been meticulous in not connecting the two identities at all. Thus, she claims that no one could possibly know the real age of the actress' stage name, unless they could connect her real name to the stage name. She claims that in signing up for IMDBPro, she supplied her credit card, with her real name, which Amazon then used to identify who she was and to figure out her actual date of birth. The woman insists that she appears much younger, and that she's suffered greatly from having her age revealed:

First, because lesser-known forty-year-old actresses are not in demand in the entertainment business, Plaintiff has suffered a substantial decrease in acting credits, employment opportunities and earnings since Defendants’ addition of Plaintiff’s legal date of birth to the Internet Movie Database. Second, because Plaintiff looks so much younger than her actual age indicates, Plaintiff has experienced rejection in the industry for each “forty-year-old” role for which she has interviewed because she does not and cannot physically portray the role of a forty-year old woman.

So what's the actual legal issue? She's claiming breach of contract, fraud, and violations of Washington State's privacy and consumer protection acts. The details suggest that it's not quite as crazy as it seemed at first... but still pretty crazy. First off, it's not entirely clear that Amazon actually did what she claims (used her credit card info to establish her age). It's entirely possible that the info on IMDB came from other sources. Second, even if it's upsetting to her, it's not at all clear that one's age is the kind of info that could ever be deemed "private" or personally identifiable info that is subject to privacy rules. The case seems to hinge on whether or not there's any real expectation of privacy in one's age. I just can't see a court buying that argument.