ARTICOLO TRATTO DA JANE MAGAZINE

Compute

After Alyssa Milano's brother saw her naked on the Web, she and her mom became the porn police.

By Alyssa Milano
Photographs by Sian Kennedy

 

Four years ago, when my little brother, at age 12, decided to do an Internet search of my name, he saw a lot more of Big Sis than any brother would want to see; He stumbled upon a whole slew of Web sites that showed me naked, porno-style. Some of them were real nude pictures of me, taken completely out of context from films I had done, and others weren't even photos of me-- those were the disgusting, pedophile ones. People had stuck photos of my head from when I was younger onto a 9-year-old's naked body. Those were the most upsetting.

I was devastated, and my mom, Lin, got angry. She said, "Oh, God. Oh, God", and started to tremble. But then she decided to start a company that would protect celebrities' images on the Internet called Cyber-Tracker. She harassed the Webmasters -- sent them letters asking them to stop posting the smutty photos. People didn't take her seriously at first, but each of her letters got a little bit more forceful. Then, if people didn't take the pictures down, we sued. We settled six cases out of court, and then one went to trial and we won $238,000. We thought it was important to take that money and give back to the Internet in a positive way, so we set it aside for Cyber-Tracker and another company we started, called Safesearching.com.

Safesearching.com was my idea. I thought we should make a free search engine that had no porn links, where fans could type in a celebrity's name and not have to worry that scary things would come up. And my mom just made it happen.

Part of me thinks that there should be limitations on the Internet; although the other part of me loves the fact that there aren't any. I just think it needs to be regulated better. I don't think I'll ever do nudity again because of this -- because there are no limits on how it is used, It seems that if studios or pro- duction companies want their actors to do nudity, they need to photo-copyright each frame that the actors are nude in -- or something needs to happen so the actors will feel safe.

People often think it's legal for Webmasters to exploit celebrities' bodies and make thousands of dollars a month off it. But the whole point of Cyber-Tracker is to show that it's not okay -- it's generally illegal. So now my mom has a lot of business from celebrities, politicians and others who don't want to be taken advantage of over the Internet... and my brother won't ever have to see me buck naked again.