Is Anybody Down?

» see isanybodydown.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The thing that killed this site was a consumer protection agency, which is worth sitting with for a second. Not a criminal charge, and not one of the defamation suits that were flying around at the time. The Federal Trade Commission, whose ordinary work is misleading advertising and unfair billing, and whose jurisdiction here came from the fact that the operation had a second business attached to the first one.

Is Anybody Down went up on 1 december 2011, run by Craig Brittain and Chance Trahan, and it copied a format that Hunter Moore's Is Anyone Up had already made notorious. Users uploaded nude photographs of people they knew, and the site published them alongside whatever identified the person in them, down to a telephone number and a screenshot of their Facebook page. There was a section that offered users free items in exchange for supplying the social media accounts of people already pictured. The identification was never incidental to the product. It was the product.

The scale was small. The FTC's complaint counted more than a thousand people whose images and details went up, and the reporting afterward put the total the site earned at around twelve thousand dollars. That is a rounding error against the harm, and it is also the reason the story is not better known. This was not a large site. It was a two-person operation that found a way to make a living out of a mechanism, and the mechanism is the part that mattered.

I have no memory of this from the years it was running, and I would not expect to. Nothing about it traveled. It worked on specific Americans one at a time rather than on an audience, and the only reason it has a public record at all is that a federal agency and a First Amendment lawyer both decided to write one. I came to it the way most people outside the United States would have, through the settlement documents, years after the site was gone.

~ the dossier ~

~ the second business ~

Alongside the site there were removal services operating under the names Takedown Hammer and Takedown Lawyer. If your photograph appeared, one of these would offer, for a fee between two hundred and five hundred dollars, to get it removed. The FTC's complaint stated that both were owned and operated by Brittain. Marc Randazza, a First Amendment lawyer who spends most of his career on the other side of speech cases, compiled the evidence tying the two operations together and offered to represent anyone whose images had been posted without permission.

That structure is what turned an ugly website into a case an agency could bring. Publishing user-submitted content sits behind a shield that has protected every host on the American internet since 1996. Running the removal desk yourself does not. It converts the whole thing into a transaction with a customer, and once there is a customer there is a claim about what the money buys, and once there is a claim the FTC can ask whether it was true.

~ what the ftc actually charged ~

The complaint was about deception rather than about the photographs. It described a site that did not respond when the people pictured asked for their material to be taken down, while a service under common ownership advertised exactly that outcome for money. Brittain also obtained images by posing as a woman on Craigslist and trading pictures with people who believed they were talking to someone else, which the agency documented as part of the same pattern.

The settlement was announced on 29 january 2015 and the final order was approved on 8 january 2016, after the public comment period. The terms required permanent deletion of every image and every piece of personal information the site had collected. They also imposed a standing bar on publicly sharing intimate photographs or video without the express consent of the person in them. No money changed hands. The order was about stopping the thing from happening again.

~ what came after ~

The shutdown itself was a tweet. On 4 april 2013 Brittain wrote that as of that day Is Anybody Down was over, which most people read as the end. The content moved to a different domain instead, which is the usual shape of these endings and the reason the FTC's deletion requirement two years later was the part that actually did something.

What followed is remembered better than the site itself. Once the settlement was reported, Brittain filed DMCA takedown notices with Google over twenty-three news articles about the case, on the grounds that they used photographs of the complainant without permission, which is close to the exact objection the site had spent sixteen months ignoring. In 2015 the two founders went looking for money for a ride-hailing startup called Dryvyng, and the attention it got was mostly about what its founders had done before.

Behind all of it the law kept moving. State statutes against nonconsensual intimate imagery started arriving in 2013 and eventually covered the whole country, with a federal removal requirement following much later. Is Anybody Down is a footnote in that story, but it is the footnote that showed where the soft place was. Not the images, which were protected by a shield built for hosts. The fee.

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