It happens every day. Woman breaks up with boyfriend; boyfriend creates bogus Yahoo! profile in woman's name; boyfriend populates profile pages with nude photos of woman; boyfriend also includes phone numbers and work address; boyfriend pretends to be woman in Yahoo! chat rooms; boyfriend links strangers to errant profiles; boyfriend promises sex to strangers in woman's name; strangers show up at woman's office expecting sex. Maybe it doesn't happen quite every day. But it reportedly happened to Cecelia Barnes, who has been suffering the consequences of her breakup since last December. Yahoo! has allegedly failed to remove the ersatz profiles upon repeated requests, so now it's a lawsuit.

Yahoo! previously made headlines for refusing to relinquish password-protected e-mail belonging to a soldier killed in Iraq, whose family requested the material. Yahoo!'s case was reasonable; and after due process in the courts Yahoo! promptly turned over the e-mail account. In this case, if the vindictive boyfriend owns the passwords to the bogus profiles, Yahoo! might insist on the same due process.