Businesswoman Sues Over Plastic Surgery Publication

A plastic surgeon was sued for violating patient privacy after she published a former client’s topless photos to advertise her clinic’s tummy tuck and breast augmentation services. The photos were published without the patient’s knowledge or permission, and were allegedly harmful to the patient’s online business as they had been published with her full name uncensored. The photos were published under the patient’s full name and without her knowledge or permission; allegedly, during their time online they had become detrimental to the client’s own Etsy business, which relied on online clients. Even when the images were removed, the link to the plastic surgery’s site would still appear as the first google result on an internet search of the patient’s full name. In the ensuing case, an individual with expertise in engine data analytics was solicited to analyze the number of views these images had received.

Question(s) For Expert Witness

Expert Witness Response E-037602

I could prepare an estimate of the number of views these images received, but it would be based on third-party Web-tracking services. I’ve been able to analyze daily pageviews of hundreds of websites since 1995, and often “time on page” — but I had unlimited access to the domain’ traffic logs. I would need to see the surgeon’s weblogs from their hosting service to get the hard numbers on how many people clicked through and viewed the given pages. The search engines would also have hard numbers, but only on how many people clicked through, not on how many people actually successfully accessed and viewed the pages.

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