Hoang signed up for a subscription service with the website called IMDb Pro... She said she initially listed a false birth year - 1978, instead of 1971 - because she usually plays characters younger than she is.

But eventually, she moved from her hometown of Houston, Texas, to the more competitive entertainment market of Los Angeles, and as what would have been her fake 30th birthday approached, she decided she didn't want any age listed on her profile.

IMDb refused to remove the age listed unless she could provide evidence that it was incorrect. She asked the company to check its records to see if it had any information that would substantiate that age.

The company did so - using her account information to find her real name, and then using her real name to conduct a public records search and discover her true age. IMDb posted her real age on her profile, over her objections.

“Hoang did not present any testimony, documents, or other evidence supporting her damages allegations of lost income and profits. Neither Hoang nor her agent Joe Kolkowitz—her only two witnesses on damages—offered any testimony about future damages, and neither offered competent testimony on which a reasonable jury could base an award of damages for acting jobs allegedly lost to date.”

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

U.S. District Judge Marsha J. Pechman granted an order to dismiss the plaintiff's case on Friday, pursuant to a rule that requires a complaint to name all parties. Pechman gave the woman 14 days as of Friday to include her real name in the complaint.

"[W]hile Plaintiff may face public ridicule and embarrassment if she elects to go forward under her real name, the injury she fears is not severe enough to justify permitting her to proceed anonymously," Pechman noted in her order.

The Plaintiff in the present case borrows this language and asserts that disclosing her identity will subject her to "industry blacklisting and loss of livelihood." (Dkt. No. 25 at 7.)

However, while revealing Plaintiff's identity may negatively affect her prospects of being hired as an actress, the harm she faces is of an order of magnitude less than the potential harm faced by the foreign garment workers in Advanced Textile Corp. In this case, Plaintiff is not working on a small island where her immigration status is directly tied to her employment. 214 F.3d at 1062. She is not facing eviction from company-owned housing. 214 F.3d at 1062. She faces no risk of deportation or retaliation directed at her family. 214 F.3d at 1062-63. Instead, Plaintiff argues she faces "new-age harms" such as "cyber bullying." (Dkt. No. 25 at 7.) While the economic harms she alleges may be real, Plaintiff present no evidence that the retaliation she may encounter is at all similar to the truly grave harms plaintiffs feared in Advanced Textile Corp.

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.

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.