Companies That Clean Up Bad Online Reputations

Radon360 writes "As the ever-increasing amount of information available online becomes indexed and searchable, more and more people find themselves potentially at risk of having unwanted personal information revealed or their names incorrectly associated with inflammatory topics. The are several firms that now sell their services of trying to remove or bury such information that their client deems offensive or troublesome. Companies, such as ReputationDefender and DefendMyName will, for a fee, do the legwork to find content that negatively impacts your reputation and have it removed or buried deeper in search rankings. However, some of these efforts can backfire, as the act to get it taken down can sometimes draw more attention than the offending content in the first place."

Comments

Suspicion

[FraterNLST]

You would definately have to be careful with something like this. It's the same as the US Government's approach to cryptography, the idea that "if you're hiding, you've got something to hide.". A perfectly normal person with something slightly embarressing showing up online (and who hasn't done or said something that would be embarressing to have sprawled across the net?) is likely to draw far more attention if someone finds out they're paying to make that info disappear than if they just left it to get buried in the noise. And of course, you're trusting the companies that are offering the service. Can we say blackmail? Anonymous leak?

Re:Suspicion

[Esteanil]

Personally, I'm just glad I did most of my (major) online screwups back in '95, on MUDs.

The sad thing about our lovely new commercialised net is that as long as it could be valuable to keep, it will be kept (drive space is cheap).
Add to this the various governmental ideas that as long as it could potentially at some time be construed as possibly being scary or linked to terrorist activity, ISPs should be forced to keep it... Well. I had my reasons to screw up, I'm sure plenty of the current generation have got their good reasons to screw up, but they likely won't be getting away from it as easily as I did.

Re:Suspicion

[Anonymous Coward]

wait wait... people use their real identities online???

Re:Suspicion

[Darundal]

I just did a Google search on my name, and although I have never made any online screwups, my first name is listed as being associated with an Italian spammer. At one point, my name was randomly associated with a load of porn sites. No, I don't have a common name. The sad thing is not the longevity of your screwups on the net. It is the longevity of the screwups that you didn't make, but that are associated with your name, that is truly sad. Especially since many of those things screwups that you didn't make are very hard to disprove (say, a blog by someone that has your name, that doesn't list a location, that happens to speak a lot about going out, getting drunk, partying, and many other acts that a company might disapprove of, but could be hard for you to personally disprove because of vagueness in the original writing).

Re:Suspicion

[IvyKing]

A perfectly normal person with something slightly embarressing showing up online (and who hasn't done or said something that would be embarressing to have sprawled across the net?) is likely to draw far more attention if someone finds out they're paying to make that info disappear than if they just left it to get buried in the noise.

That's pretty much what tipped Stalin off to the US work on the A-bomb - seeing a sudden cessation of publishing of nuclear research. Similarly, Stalin's crew picked up on the problem of xenon poisoning in power reactors when mention of it was deleted from the Smythe Report.

Then there's the recent uproar about a certain number being deleted from Digg...

Re:Suspicion

[G27 Radio]

It becomes especially hard to disprove when your potential employer doesn't even bring up the data they retrieved during your "background check." The HR department will decide they have better things to do than justify the background check that they did--they'll just tell you and the management that wanted to hire you that you're not qualified.

Re:Suspicion

[FraterNLST]

Exactly, it's the entire reason behind huge areas of research, particularly in data mining and analysis. What's not being said is generally even more important than what is - the first rule of diplomacy. It's Racists and Sexists that fear frank discussion on race and sex (which should make you look closely at who's driving the political correctness machine in various countries), and it is the same with every other issue. If you want to know who holds those beliefs strongly, look to who is repressing speech and publication. I can still remember talking about hiring practices and being told that to read a reference from a previous employer, you only use what is said to compare against what isn't. There are standard things you expect to read - ie, punctual, trustworthy etc. No-one ever writes "This person is late to every shifts and steals from me" - the ex-employee would just toss it out. But if you omit saying certain things, to an experience office manager you can get your point across whilst the ex-employee thinks they got a great reference. The web is an organic information mass. Anyone trying to carve even small chunks out of that mass is going to create unnatural gaps that will draw notice.

Re:Suspicion

[jack455]

Exactly; assuming you mean the hd-dvd key that the industry tried to hide.

I didn't even hear about it until the press changed from someone breaking the protection to the fact that there was a key that no one was supposed to post.

There was also a case of a drug company trying to hide the details of deaths surrounding a certain drug treatment. A judge even ruled it was illegal to disseminate, but that didn't stop and probably encouraged its widespread availability.

It might be off-topic, but I get the feeling that the temptation of security by obscurity, just like with web browsers, makes people dream of getting the genie back in the bottle. ("If I can't see you, you can't see me.")

Like a security flaw, if the information was out there it will most likely be utilized. Someone will have a copy.

Re:Suspicion

[networkBoy]

You know, I've been following your blog for some time now.
I would tend to suggest that you simply point employers at it.
If I was a hiring manager (I am not, and hope to never be one), I would likely offer you a job right now (after reading your resume), if you were willing to relocate. Your writing is quite good.
-nB

Re:Suspicion

[h2g2bob]

Yeah, he offers you a job now, but wait until he googles your name...

Re:Suspicion

[MMC Monster]

I said a lot of silly things back in the late 80's/early 90's in usenet (under another name), and it's still indexed in google.

Re:Suspicion

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you done a Google on the university Professor (Ivan Perry) in the article who tried to use ReputationDefender to clean up his online image? His misdemeanors even turn up if you Google ReputationDefender or AutoAdmit. It sure didn't work for him!

Re:Suspicion

[d3ac0n]

That's the one really nice thing about having a very common name. You always have plausible deniability.

Potential Employer: We have found some troubling things on the Internet attribitued to you Mr./Ms. (insert very common name)

You: Um, that's not me.

Potential Empoyer: We would like to believe you, but your name is all over it.

You: Do you have any idea how common my name is? Just Google it! You'll find people with the same name as me all over the internet!

Potential Employer: Hmm.. Good point. Ok, you're hired!

Ok, maybe that's a bit simplified, but the overall principle remains the same. As long as there aren't full-face photos of you doing porn, alcohol or drugs, you should be OK.

Of course, people with uncommon names don't have it so easy. Sucks to be them I guess.

Re:Suspicion

[Anonymous Coward]

You nailed the real problem - the perception that people can find out your past doing a google search. It's simply an urban legend with no truth whatever. The tragedy, as you say, is believing this as a possible employer or romantic interest may google your name and find another person with the same name who is a spammer or pornographer.

In 1997 I started a blog (before the term was coined) simply because my ISP offered a web site for free. It was only a week or two before I got an email saying "hi, I'm Steve McGrew, too". This guy was at the time a semi-famous comedian who had been on TV with Jeff Foxworthy. Curious, I did my own search on the name and found no less than 6 people with my name who had online presences. And this was in 1997!

I've posted my name at /. responding to this sort of topic several times, and each and every time someone posts the mailing address and cell phone number of some poor fellow from Canada. This despite the fact that only 4 years ago I was posting what became a popular series of diaries on K5 that became known as "The Paxil Diaries" about a nerd's unsucessful search for sex, under the name "mcgrew". I can't find them at all now outside my own hard drive, although Google still lists some of the other K5 articles I wrote back then. This is exactly the sort of stuff many would find embarrassing - but it disappeared.

Back when I played Quake I had an online British friend named Neal Harriot. I'd been a fan of his "Yello There" parody of Blue's News, and it turned out he was a fan of my Springfield Fragfest. Neal died of MS several years ago, and you can't even find "Yello There" in the Wayback Machine, except for one page that I'd posted on my site as part of a running gag. Dopey Smurf is gone, too (and he's probably glad as he was a medical student at the time), and he could be damned hilarious. Well, you might still be able to find one I posted for him, "Dopey Smurf's Guide to the E3 Booth Babes".

It's an urban legend! Especially with online aliases. Yes, they might find Cmdr Taco but they're not going to find localroger or circletimessquare.

What puzzles me is as many computer nerds here who have surely dealt with large databases, nobody seems to realise that a name alone is a terrible identifier!

-mcgrew (sm62704 when logged on)

Re:Suspicion

[porcupine8]

as long as it could be valuable to keep, it will be kept

Tell me about it. When I was in high school, I made a web page on tripod that has horrible loud backgrounds and graphics and talks for far too long about my then-boyfriend. All around, very embarrassing. I haven't touched it in nine years, since my freshman year of college, and it's STILL THERE! I've long since forgotten the password, the email account it's linked to is long gone, and per my email exchanges with tripod tech support I seem to have registered it with fake personal info (address etc). So so far, I haven't been able to convince them to either take it down or give me the password. NINE YEARS! They've been wasting server space on a site that never gets edited for NINE YEARS! And it still is a top google hit if you search for my maiden name. Thank god I'm married now.

Re:Suspicion

[mcmonkey]

The problem is the conversation you described is a very, very, very rare thing.

A much more likely scenario is:

Potential Employer: Thank you for meeting with us. We'll let you know.

You: Thank you. I look forward to working together.

Potential Employer: ...

You: Hello? We met for an interview recently. Have you made a decision?

Potential Employer: ...

You: wtf?

If the employer really wants you and has no other comparable candidates, it may come up just as a CYA so employer can say, "he said it wasn't him." In any other case, it won't come up. They'll just hire someone else instead.

On the bright side, soon everyone will have some sort of embarrassing or undesirable content online associated with their name, whether it refers to the person in question or just someone with the same name. Like job-hopping. So many IT workers in their 20s and 30s spent the last decade in a series of short-term positions, an employer looking to exclude people with such a history will have trouble finding employees.

You don't need your online identify to be pristine. You just need to be cleaner than the next guy.

Re:Suspicion

[Zenaku]

My name is not especially common, but there is another person with the same first and last name as me, who is also from the same hometown as I am, and is 8 or 9 years younger than me.

I first became aware of him when I was in high-school -- his drawing of a ninja turtle was published in the children's section of the newspaper, with my name under it. I got teased. Then a short while later I endured some more razzing when he called the local radio station (and got on air) to request a song that I hated.

I've heard about him numerous times over the years, just because of wires getting crossed. A friend will tell me that they met someone else who knows me, only it will be someone I have never met. My sister will get asked if she is related to me, say yes, and then get a follow up question about how I'm doing that makes no sense, because the person is really asking about the other guy.

I figure he must be about 21 now. God help me, I hope he doesn't have a myspace page.

Re:Suspicion

[G27 Radio]

Thanks. I'm committed to the business I've started, at least for the next year, so I won't be looking a job before that. In fact I think that in a couple months it will be profitable enough to stay with long term or sell it--of course, I've said that before and the growth wasn't as fast as I'd expected. Still I think I've got a solid foundation now, so I'm not looking for new work at present.

If I were to apply for a new job I'd definitely do everything in my power to make sure they knew I was not a criminal. The problem in the past was that I had no reason to believe there was anything on my record, let alone a bunch of felonies, so I had no idea why I'd started getting turned down for jobs all of a sudden.

Even with proof that my identity was stolen I think I'd still be at a disadvantage--at least with a big company. If it's their policy not to hire people that fail a background check, they'll most likely just pass me over for someone with a clean record rather than doing the extra work to push it through the corporate bureaucracy. And, the fact is, anyone can claim that their record is inaccurate, and it will always require that someone go the extra mile to verify that my claim is true.

Re:Suspicion

[Anonymous Coward]

>> being associated with an Italian spammer..[and]...a load of porn sites.

Maybe Dick. N. Hancer is not the name for you?

Re:Suspicion

[skinfaxi]

I've never made any online screwups either, but if you Google my name, it turns up in a lot of spammy web sites. It's because I have a longstanding website that has some useful information on it, and I write a monthly column that is printed online. The spammy websites appear to scrape random data from personal and commercial websites so that they will have some kind of content. I can't imagine my name helps much, it's pretty unique to me and not many people are going to be searching for it! It's annoying but I think pretty apparent to anyone that looks that I didn't have anything to do with it being there.

Re:Suspicion

[FraterNLST]

It's the goat's isn't it? The goats always come back to bite you.

Disturbing

[royrules22]

This is a disturbing trend. We could find to-be politicians removing everything bad about themseleves and painting a good picture just so people vote for them. Not good.

Re:Disturbing

[FraterNLST]

Because government officials have never tried to cover up after themselves before? And they havn't got the resources to do it by themselves? Actually, if anyone is unlikely to use these services, it's probably politicians. They're far better off trusting their close allies to help them cover up then to risk letting an outside company, who may or may not share their political leanings, know that they want information disappeared.

Re:Disturbing

[royrules22]

Because government officials have never tried to cover up after themselves before? And they havn't got the resources to do it by themselves? Actually, if anyone is unlikely to use these services, it's probably politicians. They're far better off trusting their close allies to help them cover up then to risk letting an outside company, who may or may not share their political leanings, know that they want information disappeared. While that is true, this makes it easy for any no-good person to do. While privacy is a good thing, painting a false picture of yourself for the internets/public is not.

Re:Disturbing

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hardly that concerning.

I've taken then time to remove some old newgroup postings from Google Groups, and I've gone through and removed some stuff I said from editable forum postings.

When have we ever had a record of everything people say so easily accessible by the general public at large? The internet isn't that old, and it wasn't exactly obvious that things you posted to newsgroups would be archived forever. And, at that early time, a lot of people used real names.

I see no major problem with these services.

Re:Disturbing

[VariableGHz]

They're far better off trusting their close allies to help them cover up then to risk letting an outside company, who may or may not share their political leanings, know that they want information disappeared.

Mod parent up.

Indeed, it's unlikely that they (a politician) would give a third party the trust necessary to cover up something that would be important enough to have them contact the cover-up company in the first place.

Re:Disturbing

[Joebert]

I agree.
The first Politician to run a campaign that shows me everything they've ever done, including fucking that retarded girl in the butt after getting her to pretend she's a pony, will be the first Politician to get my vote.

Re:Disturbing

[nyquist_theorem]

The problem actually runs much deeper than that. Those of us who know how the net works and have seen the fossilised remains of our online actions during the latter part of the previous century wash up on more recent shores know only too well that we've likely already participated in enough silliness to effectively prevent us from seeking political office, lest we have past indiscretions show up in our faces at the worst possible time - which is of course when they always turn up.

Clinton, Bush, and Obama have all admitted (or at least lied poorly about, which is the same thing really) past indiscretions, but they were largely able to control when the news of those indiscretions came out. Tomorrow's politicians know they won't be so lucky. Unless the trend is reversed, our children will be forced to choose from candidates with completely sterilised white-bread virgin-till-marriage always-feed-the-meter coke-is-a-beverage pasts. Which, like it or not, is not the sort of past from which a real leader comes.

Google's new shorter-term memory is only a start. What other steps should be taken? Dunno. Which is why most of my most entertaining moments usually end with 'whoops, guess I won't be getting into politics now!' (My educational background is in political science, which makes the joke passably humourous. Or so I tell myself.)

Re:Disturbing

[ozmanjusri]

Unless the trend is reversed, our children will be forced to choose from candidates with completely sterilised white-bread virgin-till-marriage always-feed-the-meter coke-is-a-beverage pasts.

Or we could just become a bit more tolerant instead.

Re:Disturbing

[FraterNLST]

This seems a bit naive to me. To speak of "no-good" person, I assume you mean criminal. You might mean morally no-good, but really, if they're doing something you find offensive morally (excessive drinking, participating in obscure religions, sodomy...) and they can find a way to keep it off the net, more power too them. It's really no-one else's business whilst they're obeying the law. If they're breaking the law, thats different. However, this sounds very similar to the anti-drugs, anti-guns type laws and arguments that go on in the US and here in Australia, to a lesser degree. The idea is, that if you make it hard to do something (by making it illegal is a perfect example), then people wont do it. The truth is of course that people who want to do it, do it. If you did stop these companies from helping people to paint a false picture of themselves, as you put it, by making it illegal or shooting them, however you'd do it, you would definately stop some people from doing it. Some of the privacy obsessed who hate the idea that info about them floats about would have to deal...a lot of casual users info would remain untouched. Those that really wanted the info gone. The real "no-good" guys, would make the info gone, and have been making it gone i'm sure. As Penn and Teller said in their episode on gun control - "How, you might ask, does a convicted criminal get a gun when it's against the law for them to do so? THEY BREAK THE LAW". That is, after all, the definition of a criminal.

Re:Disturbing

[FraterNLST]

Completely - At what point did we decide our leaders had to be perfect? Sainthood is for religions, not leaders. I mean really, is it so terrible if a president/prime minister/whatever smoked a bit of pot once? Or if he likes to get blowjobs in the oval office? We should be reserving that sort of disgust for people who prey on the weak, and steal and cheat huge quantities of money. I'm not talking about shoplifting when they were fifteen to impress their friends, but real crimes. I can tell you, the majority of Australians (of my social crowds anyway ;) ) couldn't work out what the big deal was with the Clinton problems. Sure cheating sucks, makes him a lousy husband and some would say a pretty lousy person. Doesn't make him a bad president. Starting wars with countries based on hidden agenda's aimed at stealing wealth from the citizens of those countries. Thats a pretty lousy president. But aren't we lucky he isn't getting head.

Re:Disturbing

[neonmonk]

What a fabulous idea!

*holds breath*

Re:Disturbing

[clickclickdrone]

I'm with you there. I'm far more likely to vote for a politician who sometimes says 'Well, we messed that up' or 'We thought x but now it's clear y was correct'. Equally, companies who tell it like it is tend to get my business. If some firm says 'we found out our product is flawed but here's what we're going to do to fix it' I'll stick with them but if it's 'no, no problem, la la la la' it's all over.

Re:Disturbing

[clickclickdrone]

>*holds breath*
Dude, you're turning a sort of blue colour... Dude?
What would help a lot is if people got a little less (well, a lot less) litigious over every teeny tiny thing that happens and stop being such a bunch of victime. Sometimes stuff happens or people say stuff. Just roll with it.

Re:Disturbing

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats old news actually. WikiPedia allready has had its share of it (election-comittee members trying to eradicate everything about the politician they supported that could be viewed negative -- even if it was the truth.

Nothing to see here, move along please.

Re:Disturbing

[smellsofbikes]

You do recall the articles about politicians editing their Wikipedia entries to remove negative information, or in some cases to alter the reports on their voting records, right?

Re:Disturbing

[moogle001]

Do voters really need to know whether I got drunk at some keggers in college? Whether I joined any gay personals? There's a lot of information that is nobody's business, employers or voters.

it's true

[Anonymous Coward]

Consider the time roblimo took a picture of his stretched out asshole. Then posted it on the alt.binaries.pictures.homosexual. If he had left it at that, people would have been disgusted, but nobody would know it was him. Instead, he files DMCA takedown lawsuits to have it removed from hick.org. Now everybody knows that roblimo is the goatse man.

Re:it's true

[Joebert]

Could that indicate that he thought someone was going to recognise his stretched out asshole & tell everyone about it anyway ?

Re:it's true

[Gojaroo]

The fact that you know about that in depth might not be good for your online reputation. Ha.

Re:it's true

[MysteriousPreacher]

I can imagine the situation. The goatse family sitting there browsing the web and gran ma says "Hey, I recognise that lower colon!"

Re:it's true

[Joebert]

The goatse family

They're freaky & they're fruity, mysteriously into dookie, they're all together spooning, The Goatsee Family.

Re:it's true

[MysteriousPreacher]

They're freaky & they're fruity, mysteriously into dookie, they're all together spooning, The Goatsee Family.

Oh that made my day!

ReputationDefender and DefendMyName Suck!

[Anonymous Coward]

And they kill babies and rape puppies! Or maybe it's the other way around!?

(Let's see them defend themselves against THAT!)

Re:ReputationDefender and DefendMyName Suck!

[Anonymous Coward]

And they kill babies and rape puppies! Or maybe it's the other way around!?

....In Soviet Russia, puppies rape you?

Re:ReputationDefender and DefendMyName Suck!

[Anonymous Coward]

They kill rape and baby puppies?

Re:ReputationDefender and DefendMyName Suck!

[ABasketOfPups]

I can't begin to tell you how disturbing that is, either way.

This has been happening for years...

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft have been using this technique for years... they outsource a company called "Fanboys"

Re:This has been happening for years...

[grapeape]

Mr. Kutaragi? I thought you retired?

Re:This has been happening for years...

[ozmanjusri]

Microsoft have been using this technique for years... they outsource a company called "Fanboys"

No, fanboys tend to be a spontaneous thing. Microsoft's astroturf is much more calculated, and has involved a company called DCI.

DCI have funded groups like Americans for Technology Leadership (ATL), and the Association for Competitive Technology to shill for MS in the past.

The current astroturf campaigns here and in other blogs is likely to be coordinated by DCI or a similar PR firm.

Re:This has been happening for years...

[MillionthMonkey]

The American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR) popped in and out of existence a while back like a virtual particle to get everyone riled up about "voter fraud". Basically when workers are paid by the number of registrations, Mickey Mouse and Mister Magoo show up on the rolls in multiple districts and if Mister Magoo actually shows up to vote in all those districts that's "affirmative voter fraud" oh no! These dead people and cartoon characters always vote for Democrats. So we need voter ID laws and stiffer punishments for incorrect voting in case they show up, right?

There is a great article on Slate about this. The ACVR was set up by a lawyer in Saint Louis named Mark "Thor" Fernlund Hearne, II, who works for a law firm in St. Louis Missouri called Lathrop & Gage, L.C. (I just love it when guys can't say "Jr." and they try to make it into a "II".) Wikipedia's articles about both Thor Hearne and his American Center for Voting Rights have been repeatedly cleansed by somebody from an IP address in his law firm. Just look at a few of those diffs. Wikipedia is still good for some things!

Re:This has been happening for years...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're thinking of Apple. Microsoft uses professionals.

Logic

[mauddib~]

So, it appears we go back to a masked society. Now, we learn from history and see that the fact that masking happens is an indicator that we feel that there is an unfair judging taking place and we want a level playfield. In the end, we can all take off our masks, because it is who we are, not who we were, that ultimately defines us.

Now, we're so lucky that we have intelligent and abstract thinking personnel managers (newspeak: Human Resource Managers) who will be able to look over such inconveniences as the tracks we leave behind and focus on personality and ability, mixed with some cultural heritage, ignoring the ambiguity of the net altogether. Or, maybe this takes another 50 years to sink in for the working area you might work in (given a lack of such 'Human Resource Managers' at a place near you).

In my case...

[tverbeek]

In my case, the first thing they'd have to do is take down Slashdot. Yeah, like that'd work. :)

Re:In my case...

[Culture20]

If they're clueful at all, they'd submit a story about slashdot, complete with a link. Has slashdot ever been slashdotted?

Re:In my case...

[Idbar]

Maybe they can get you some karma points on slashdot! :)

Re:In my case...

[Anonymous Coward]

How very interesting that you seem to already know this about him. I wonder why this is important to you?

This can extend beyond personal reputations..

[3seas]

.. but can be used to bury information, bring forward disinformation, etc...

Information is information, and it don't care what sequence of symbols are attached... seek, find and bury or bring forward.

wayback machine

[narced]

Having dug up some dirty old web sites on friends, I'm sure we all know about the wayback machine at http://www.archive.org/web/web.php.

I wonder if these goons also create a robots.txt file on the server that they are trying to clean up? It would be hard to remove content from the wayback machine that you do not own.

Re:wayback machine

[rs79]

Oh it's not hard to remove stuff from wayback. It's virtually impossible. Read the conditions under which Brewster et al will take stuff down. There are very very few cases where they'll actually do this.

Re:wayback machine

[DaveLatham]

I followed your suggestion and went to look. However, it seems to say this:

"How can I remove my site's pages from the Wayback Machine?

The Internet Archive is not interested in preserving or offering access to Web sites or other Internet documents of persons who do not want their materials in the collection. By placing a simple robots.txt file on your Web server, you can exclude your site from being crawled as well as exclude any historical pages from the Wayback Machine."

and further down it says:

"Sometimes a web site owner will contact us directly and ask us to stop crawling or archiving a site, and we endevor to comply with these requests. When you come accross a 'blocked site error' message, that means that a siteowner has made such a request and it has been honored."

http://www.archive.org/about/faqs.php#The_Wayback_ Machine

Re:wayback machine

[Anonymous Coward]

um... note the phrases "your Web site" and "siteowner". So to recap, you can have the archive removed IF it's your Web server, or you have the site owner's agreement to take it down. They don't specify any other criteria, but they seem principled in favor of freedom of information, and they're just reproducing and attributing content that's already there or been there.

Re:wayback machine

[Lurker187]

Note that they mention specifically how to stop crawling, but as has been pointed out before, what's important is what's NOT there, which is a direct reference to removing anything ALREADY in the archives. What seems to be implied is, "If you didn't want your content archived, you should have used a robots.txt file, moron!"

Re:wayback machine

[neolith]

I just went to the site, and it doesn't seem to say that. If you own the site, setup a robots.txt file and they will stop crawling your site in the future, AND remove the archived pages. Also, if you follow the link to the academic archiving standards they follow, they seem to be open to removing archived stuff not under your direct control, on a case by case basis.

Careful there Vicar

[democrates]

The number one danger is posting to bulletin boards. I got the 2600.com hope conference dvd special with a private dick presentation on the state of the art in stealation of private data, and it scared me.

Never use your real name, always post anonymously, always, without fail.

Re:Careful there Vicar

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok then...

Employees/Employers

[bh_doc]

I've heard stories (on ./ mind you) about companies doing google searches and the like on potential employees, and I can see how an applicant would consider the use of these services, perhaps for some specific reason, or just to clean their google-reputation generally, to get an edge over their competition. What worries me, though, is that employers actually take such searches seriously. The phrase "The internet is serious business" is meant to be a joke, but it seems to go over some people's heads.

I wonder if in the future we'll ever see legislation against discrimination by internet search? Not for a while at least, I posit --- there are probably more deserving unlegislated discriminations to target first.

Re:Employees/Employers

[Anonymous Coward]

I really don't know how much they think they'll accomplish by running a Google search on a potential employee's name, given that they'll get results for different people with the same name. In my case, my surname is not terribly uncommon and my given name is exceptionally common. I know for a fact that there are multiple people out there with the same name as me, and I can be fairly certain that at least one of them would generate more search engine hits than me.

Re:Employees/Employers

[Anonymous Coward]

And in fact, I just ran a Google search on my own name, and got to page 20 before I gave up on finding one result that was actually me. It gets better: one of the results with the same name as me, on page 1 no less, is a higher-up in a company I vaguely recall applying for a job at.

Re:Employees/Employers

[Wansu]

  "... I can see how an applicant would consider the use of these services, perhaps for some specific reason, or just to clean their google-reputation generally ..."

Yeah, a sort of reputation laundering ...

Re:Employees/Employers

[bh_doc]

But what if a potential employer (or HR staff, whatever) had done such a search, and found one of your namesake's recipe for crystal meth? You had better hope that employer is smart enough to realise it isn't the same person, but do you honestly believe that?

Re:Employees/Employers

[Anonymous Coward]

In my case, highly unlikely. Unless those sorts of results were on page 21 or later.

Still. Given the number of clearly different people that turn out to have the same name as me, any employer thick enough to not work out that odds are I'm not the same person is not someone I want to work for.

This seems like a great idea. I need this bad.

[ip_freely_2000]

I think I'll hire these guys after I leave my current job in 2009. It may take a few bucks to get it done, though.

                                    -- George W. Bush

Re:This seems like a great idea. I need this bad.

[yabba-dabba-do]

LOL, I wish I had mod points.

My /. comment history

[Alien Being]

Most of the time I try to say something useful, but sometimes I just speak my mind and don't care if people find it annoying. I wonder how much would it cost to eradicate all the useful shit?

Re:My /. comment history

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what the "Post Anonymously" checkbox is for... ;-)

Now for my real feelings...

but can they fix karma?

[flyneye]

Hell,if they can fix karma for a price,I can slide Cowboy Neil a fin to bail my own rotten troll ass out.

That explains it

[edwardpickman]

I was wondering why the web searches for drag photos of Giuliani are coming up bust.

Re:That explains it

[Anonymous Coward]

I was wondering why the web searches for drag photos of Giuliani are coming up bust.

Only if by "coming up bust" you mean being the very first result when searching for "Giuliani" on Google image search.

Re:That explains it

[Hal_Porter]

Are you kidding? He's got the pictures of him looking goofy in drag for the left, and the pictures of him looking presidential in front of a smoking ruin for the right. Both sides may be a bit annoyed by the image that isn't aimed at them, but the image that is more than makes up for it. And I'm sure if I were part of a pro or anti anything group his PR people could find some speech that makes it sound as if he agrees with me.

Re:That explains it

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean he's running as the transvestite President of 9/11?

Powerful.

Re:That explains it

[Hal_Porter]

I reckon al Qaeda suspects would tell us the location of the Secret Rebel Base if they were suddenly hauled out of torture dungeons for surprise cocktails with a drunk and very friendly President in an ill fitting dress.

Re:That explains it

[Anonymous Coward]

Life was so much simpler when the only lie the President told was whether he was banging a fat girl.

Re:That explains it

[Hal_Porter]

Life just seemed more simple. Al Qaeda was still at war with America. They'd attacked embassies, the USS Cole and the WTC. It's just that the Clinton was too busy with other issues to do anything about it.

Re:That explains it

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, yeah! Defending himself for lying about banging the fat chick! Thank god the republicans were keeping Billy busy so Al Queda could work on its plans...

been there done that

[um... Lucas]

An acquaintance was arrested and served time in jail. Upon getting out, he googled himself and the top 5 links in google, along with several others, were all news articles pertaining to his arrest. So he asked me if we could bump those down in the rankings... Sure enough we did, by combination of both good press and posting a lot of cross-referenced fluff, the "tainted" material now has been pushed back to page 3 of googles results.

That said, it's not hidden, and if someone came upon it, it would be useless to deny, but he thought it valuable to at least not haev it come up first in the rankings

Re:been there done that

[timeOday]

Instead, you first get 3 pages of "good press," like "Joe Brown is not serving time for beating his wife any more!"

Re:been there done that

[klenwell]

Reminds me of something from the Myspace 95 Thesis:

"Information wants to be free, but then so does misinformation. Protect your identity by freely applying a layer of misinformation."

Good advice.

Re:been there done that

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill? Is that you?

Re:been there done that

[Terrasque]

I find it interesting that you, a third party, can dump a page from first result on google, to page three. Especially with all these news about companies whining about pagerank lately.

"Nice pagerank you got there. Would be a shame if something happened to it."

Re:been there done that

[Longtime_Lurker_Aces]

It is actually pretty easy if the keywords are not common (such as a fairly uncommon name). I put a personal/professional website up with the only goal being that if someone searched for specifically my name it would be at the top of the rankings.

1 week after launching, and with only a handful of incoming links, Google Yahoo and MSN have my page as the first result for my name. Ask.com still doesn't know the site exists, but thats because ask sucks.

The Streisand Effect

[spellraiser]

However, some of these efforts can backfire, as the act to get it taken down can sometimes draw more attention than the offending content in the first place.

This is known as the Streisand Effect, the scourge of all Internet censors.

Interestingly, I note that this Wikipedia article is now being considered for deletion. Wouldn't it be ironic if it got deleted and then popped up somewhere else?

internet archive anyone?

[timmarhy]

this seems like a huge waste of money, google and archive.org cache huge parts of the internet for anyone who wants to look. bottom line is, never use your real name and never identify yourself. also beware of mailing lists

Re:internet archive anyone?

[bdcrazy]

I pose a question on how would/should we deal with those with similiar/same name or similiar/same nickname? I find that much more problematic than trying to remove something you did do. A Company wishes to hire you and does a search. They wouldn't be able to tell one from the other in this case. That i find disturbing. I've had my nickname for over 15 years on forums and usenet to muds and bulletin boards and stuff, and then last spring i started seeing someone with the same nick in california posting book reviews on amazon.com, very wierd. Then again last fall, i noticed someone with my NAME AND NICKNAME that was listed as a high schooler from ohio, needless to say its very disconcerting concerning possible blind searches on names/nicknames.
I know you can always go anonymous, but i've never been a coward and always tend to speak my mind and this would go both ways.

Re:internet archive anyone?

[wikinerd]

I think it's too paranoid to never use your real name and being beware of mailing lists. Not having an online presence, preferably under your real name, can be a disadvantage in job applications or subcontracting, not to say even in simple social interaction. Those who are accustomed on the Internet ***expect*** to find something about you online, and if they don't many times they may be suspicious.

Reputation lmoa

[zakeria]

I find it hard to believe that people still have reputations these days, its no good give it up and have one less thing to worry about!

Facebook and MySpace too

[Actually, I do RTFA]

I've heard stories about employers using Facebook searches. They would get summer associates/recent grads to look up applicants. These stories are anecdotal, but only one degree of seperation, so I believe them (although two for you, so...)

And on /. I heard about a teacher who lost their job because of their MySpace page. Granted, it was a little more detailed than that, as apparently she was directing students to her page, and it had drinking. But in those cases it is idiots posting pictures of themselves.

But I see the discrimination as being an increasing threat due to the relative easy and persistence of spreading rumors anonymously. Employee too vital, get dumped? Now, I know this whole article is about companies that fix the problem for $120-$12,000 a year, but we all know how sucessful Internet censorship is.

Re:Facebook and MySpace too

[Gordonjcp]

she was directing students to her page, and it had drinking

Because heaven forfend that school pupils find out their teacher *drinks*! Won't someone think of the children?!!

In any case, in the photo in question there was no indication of any kind as to what the teacher was drinking. How on earth this could result in her losing her job I don't know. I suppose it's the sort of thing that can only happen in ultra-conservative fundamentalist theocracies where people are denied basic civil liberties.

Re:Facebook and MySpace too

[Actually, I do RTFA]

My point was it was only that she inadvertantly did it to herself. If its that easy to get an overreaction, justified or not, by mistake, imagine how much easier it would have been for someone with malice to do it to you.

Their motto

[eebra82]

ReputationDefender - "Nothing to see here, please move along."

and

DefendMyName - "We created the idea for Rockstar's Bully"

Companies That Clean Up Bad Online Reputations

[Hope M.]

There a lot of companies out there that are on the wrong track of the business, especially on the side of small and medium based internet companies, I just wonder who is in charge to stop this mess? let's discuss this further, reach me at: http://forum.affiliatebot.com/register.php

A question of motives

[clachaig]

So these sites offer a sort of anti-googlebomb service for a fee? Lord knows theres enough bad reputations, justified or not, on the net to warrant this kind of service. The main problem as I see it is that the companies actions depend on the motives of each particular client paying to "disappear".

I would hope that these companies can keep their integrity and try to adopt a "do no evil" attitude themselves, as I would hate to see a mercenary approach leading to less useful search results for the majority of web users.

Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple does it on /. all the time.

The Streisand Effect in action

[rs79]

"This is known as the Streisand Effect, the scourge of all Internet censors.

Interestingly, I note that this Wikipedia article is now being considered for deletion."

Why?

Re:The Streisand Effect in action

[Veinor]

The nomination (link goes to the discussion page) was this:

The article is about a neologism coined by a non notable blogger as a joke. I believe this topic is more suitable for Urban Dictionary than Wikipedia. The list of "Notable cases" of the "Streisand effect" all look like original research to me. I have no doubt that censorship sometimes backfires, but from now on are all such events to be referred to as examples of the "Streisand effect"? A new word that one person or a small group of people have made up and are trying to make catch on is a neologism, and isn't acceptable at Wiktionary [Wikipedia's sister dictionary project], or Wikipedia."

However, given the usage by Forbes and by reading the general consensus, I think it'll probably be kept.

Re:The Streisand Effect in action

[Hal_Porter]

Wikipedia admins AStarIsBorn, Yentl and FunnyGirl keep saying it's Non Notable. And that Adelman promised her that he would crop the damn picture before releasing it.

Interesting ...

[kbahey]

Interesting ...

Just today, I was reading an article in ComputerWorld (Canadian edition) about companies that mine the internet for a brand or company, and report flagged items to that company.

Several companies are selling this as a service or as software.

One company is Milton based RepuTrace, another is in Seattle.

They cite a case where workers said they were drunk or high when working, another case of threats against the company, ...etc.

Here is the full article.

Re:Interesting ...

[illumin8]

Several companies are selling this as a service or as software.

One company is Milton based RepuTrace, another is in Seattle.

What boggles my mind the most after reading the article is that they seem to be selling a service that Google offers for free. You can go to Google News and setup custom alerts that email you whenever your company's name appears in a news or blog article anywhere on the interweb... Sounds like the exact same service this company is selling, although they offer you either email alerts or a "phone call", presumably for those people that are not computer literate enough to regularly read email.

This seems like a totally unnecessary service being marketed to people and companies that don't know any better.

Re:Interesting ...

[Joseph Fiore]

kbahey,

Thanks for posting the link to that CW article. I wanted to take a moment to clarify a few points as well as provide some information about our company.

CoreX Technologies and Solutions Inc. specializes in tracking online communications with intentions to smear, harm, thieve, attack or target business, guarding against threats to a company's reputation, image, risk, and security protection programs.

Our flagship product RepuTrace(TM) is the All-In-One Corporate Intelligence Tool for small to large businesses that monitors all forms of social media, including blogs (+ comments), chatrooms, social networking sites, consumer sites, gripe sites, videos and images.

RepuTrace(TM) assists online reputation and brand monitoring efforts in the following ways:

o Tracks all forms of online discussion and content, including blogs, forums, consumer sites, social networking sites, video and images.

o Analyzes real-time results by sentiment, geographical location, online media type, and graphing of all relevant trends

o Manages online communications using our proprietary response system

o Maximizes your positive search results and ranking to ensure respectable and objective results are properly positioned (this is more on the SEO side, and sounds similar to what one of the companies mentioned in that article posted by samzenpus is suggesting they also do)

The advantages of a service like RepuTrace(TM) to business can be summed up by talking about such things as the depth of media sourcing, content filtering, human intervention, online client consoles, analytics, real-time trending and charting, sentiment analysis, consulting services, and risk interpretation (ie. alert clients to more serious threats) which put our offerings in an entirely different category, and as the subject of this post reads, really sets us apart from companies that claim to clean up bad online reputations.

If anyone has any questions, feel free to visit our website or blog where you will find our email and toll-free number. For those seeking a corporate tool to track online word of mouth, consumer sentiment, or negative online attention across the entire Internet, we have a short 20 minute online demo of RepuTrace(TM) that you can schedule directly from any of our sites.

Joseph Fiore
VP of Technology
CoreX Technologies and Solutions Inc.

Re:Interesting ...

[Joseph Fiore]

What boggles my mind the most after reading the article is that they seem to be selling a service that Google offers for free. You can go to Google News and setup custom alerts that email you whenever your company's name appears in a news or blog article anywhere on the interweb... Sounds like the exact same service this company is selling, although they offer you either email alerts or a "phone call", presumably for those people that are not computer literate enough to regularly read email.
This seems like a totally unnecessary service being marketed to people and companies that don't know any better.

From your post, I disagree with your comment that companies like ours are "selling a service that Google offers for free."

Judging from your comments, it would appear that you don't know the difference between using free tools and paid services to track social media.

I can appreciate your opinions with respect to your suggestion of using free alerting tools, and although they are valid, the online monitoring needs of each company is different from one another. What makes services like RepuTrace(TM) necessary can be described using two words - core competence.

For example, I'll use my own online monitoring needs, and how the mention of our product in this particular forum discussion would not have been picked up by the free alerting tool you recommended. Although in this case, it was an alert to an online mention, what's important to point out is that its a relevant alert (not an advertisement, splog or mismatch on the keyword or keyphrase).

In addition to tracking all online mentions, some of our clients require advanced warning on any/all negative online attention, with a layer of human insight that filters content, interprets risk, sentiment, and handling of the discussion and/or topic so when it arrives in their inbox, they'll know its something they need to attend to immediately. We call this level of advanced warning a "risk alert" and an example would be any online discussion where an activist element might be attempting to stage a protest or rally outside our clients operations.

I can also appreciate the Web savvy Executive, who spends the time to reach out and engage with the online community using free tools. Some of them will be rewarded for their time and devotion to the cause. However, most of them are probably already spreading themselves thin, and in such cases, even the the most savvy Net Executive understands the benefit of saving themselves the precious time to track, analyze, participate and maximize their online engagement by combining all those tools in one central online console.

All our clients are well aware of the free tools available to them. In most cases, when they see an online demo of our RepuTrace(TM) product, they themselves realize the things that put our products and services into a completely different category as it pertains to real-time online monitoring.

In fact, the overwhelming evidence in our experiences points to the fact that any time we save the business community the precious time to compile, store and report on any and all online views across the entire Internet that can make or break a brand, their reputation, or threaten security protection programs, it serves to reinforce our commitment to our clients and they view our services as an investment rather than a cost.

Joseph Fiore
VP of Technology
CoreX Technologies and Solutions Inc.

Re:Interesting ...

[illumin8]

I can appreciate your opinions with respect to your suggestion of using free alerting tools, and although they are valid, the online monitoring needs of each company is different from one another. What makes services like RepuTrace(TM) necessary can be described using two words - core competence.

Hahahaha... If you believe that crap I've got a bridge I want to sell you. Whenever I hear a consulting firm trot out those words "this is our 'core competence'" I put on my knee high boots because the shit is going to be deep...

Look, if you're not in touch enough with your customers to know what forums online they frequent, and don't know how to setup a Google News alert to find new articles on the web written about your company, go hire a college intern that does. Seriously, you don't need to pay somebody thousands of dollars to do this stuff. Any college student with a passing ability to use the internet can already tell you how to do this, so go try to sell your snake oil somewhere else...

Re:Interesting ...

[Joseph Fiore]

Look, if you're not in touch enough with your customers to know what forums online they frequent, and don't know how to setup a Google News alert to find new articles on the web written about your company, go hire a college intern that does. Seriously, you don't need to pay somebody thousands of dollars to do this stuff.

I didn't elaborate on any of the previous points regarding using paid services over free tools to persuade you to buy into it. Rather, in an attempt to dispel the notion your putting forward that paid services are monetizing on people's ignorance.

The communication with our clients is constant and dynamic, and must be in line with the rapid pace dictated by the ongoing changes in social media. I also think its important to engage and participate online - I try to make myself accessible in any social media discourse.

If I came across as too pushy or determined to try to sell you something you don't need, I want to point out that this was not my intention. My main reason for chiming in on this particular discussion was to respond on our product mention in this thread, and to clarify on the aspect that our paid service is meant to fulfill the needs of corporations wanting to safeguard and manage their online reputation, and not really meant for individuals.

Joseph Fiore
VP of Technology
CoreX Technologies and Solutions Inc.

hehe.... "backfires"...

[ZPWeeks]

If I had something to hide, and hired an SEO company to bury my dirt, I wouldn't let the Wall Street Journal write an article about it, containing said dirt and my real name.... and I wouldn't let it get Slashdotted!
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=christina+par ascandola&btnG=Google+Search
Looks like it sure worked!

Re:hehe.... "backfires"...

[plierhead]

If I had something to hide, and hired an SEO company to bury my dirt, I wouldn't let the Wall Street Journal write an article about it, containing said dirt and my real name

You have missed the point - she complained about noise from bars, and got unfairly slurred as anti-gay - so its a great outcome for her that her story gets elevated to the top.

Re:hehe.... "backfires"...

[Fnkmaster]

As the other poster mentioned, she clearly wanted to be named in this article and didn't have a problem with it or she wouldn't have volunteered to be interviewed and named as a client.

Re:hehe.... "backfires"...

[Anonymous Coward]

www.positiveliberty.com/2007/01/irony-at-cada-vez. html

Nice Try

[brocktune]

My true name is, honestly... Dave Chappelle. I'm not the famous holder of the name, but I was born first and I stake my claim. I always see it coming. The waiter spend a second too long looking at my credit card, and I know I'm about to be hit with a lame Rick James joke that he thinks is hilarious.

Let's just see them wipe the internets of Dave Chappelle...

Re:Nice Try

[bladesjester]

That's rather funny.

Google-wise, I have a similar situation. There are two other people in this field with my name - one is a former VP at Sun and the other is another software developer.

Since I come first in Google, I get mail for them on occasion (I'm sure the fact that I have jameshollingshead.com doesn't help). The last time I got mail for the former Sun VP James, I gave the lady the right contact information and asked her to say hello for me (again).

I would imagine it has to be fun for the HR people trying to figure out how I can be in three places at once =]

Re:Nice Try

[Gothmog of A]

You should be happy. Your online-reputation is indestructable -- well rather it is non-existent because who would sift through say 25 pages of search results to find one referring to you?

Re:Nice Try

[JoeD]

I can sympathize. My real name is Joe DiMaggio. My situation is a little different - he had the name first, so I've always had people comment on it, even when I was a kid.

But it does have a couple of advantages. People remember my name. And I get lost in the Google chaff.

True: I used to live on Marilyn Drive, which could be fun when ordering pizza.

Re:Nice Try

[Matt Perry]

I know exactly how you feel.

Re:Nice Try

[MorpheousMarty]

Reminds me a customer I had at a book store I used to work at. This guy had a Bill O'Rielley "no spin" jacket and was buying one of the Bill O'Rielley books. I wanted to say something until I saw his name on the credit card he was using: John Stewart I just tried to contain my laughter at that point. No it was not THE John Stewart.

Re:Nice Try

[mfrank]

Then he probably wasn't Jon Stewart, either. :)

Re:Nice Try

[MorpheousMarty]

The names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Same Service, Secretly

[Joebert]

My buddy runs a similar service, it's so secretive that not even you know it's happening, which gives you plausable deniability.

He's also the pastor at your local church part time, don't be shy when that collection plate comes around...

Not really meant for individuals

[Qwavel]

I don't think this service is really meant for individuals (even politicians). It's more for companies. If you company gets a bad reputation for damaging the environment, monopolistic practices, or bad products, then you call in these guys.

Companies already do stuff like this. When they get a bad reputation, instead of getting at the root of the problem that got them in trouble, they call in the lawyers and the marketing people, or hire a new PR firm. Well, these guys sell a specialty service within that industry.

Re:Not really meant for individuals

[Fnkmaster]

Actually, ReputationDefender is very much oriented towards individuals. Some clients may be small business owners and the like, but its definitely not targeted at large corporate clients who already have access to arrays of lawyers, PR firms, etc.

There are probably other companies out there offering similar services for corporate clients, but ReputationDefender has always been about helping regular people monitor what's being said about them online, tracking down personal information about private citizens that shouldn't be publicly available, and representing regular people who have been unfairly maligned online.

Some of these efforts can backfire

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats what ReputationDefenderDefender and DefendMyNameFromDefendMyName is for.

Reminiscent of a Robert Chambers story...

[Anonymous Coward]

Paging The King In Yellow to this thread...

I hope at least one of these firms is well read enough to have used the Yellow Sign as their logo.

Google Approved?

[weinrich]

Adding positive content to combat negative mentions isn't against Google Inc.'s rules [...] as long as the content is original and the companies don't use manipulative techniques to push pages higher in search results.

Since when do Internet websites have to obey rules from anyone, especially a search engine?

If I ran a web-reputation repair company, I would do everything I could to determine what was "against" the rules in Google's mind and do it on every website where one or more of my clients had trouble. Consequently, those sites would be flagged "rule breakers" and immediately drop very low in Google's search ratings.

My job here is done!

I've got a better idea...

[GFree]

How about the opposite? A company which specializes in spamming shit about someone you hate? Ruin their reputation for whatever your reasons.

They could call it FuckEmInTheAss, DestroyTheOpp or getthefacts.com

Repuation Defender - how it works

[vic-traill]

From TFA, ReputationDefender works like this:

1. Send a polite letter to a site you're looking to expunge info from, telling them who the company is and what they do, and what their specific requests is.

2. Get less polite, including "contacting a site's Internet service provider to complain about the site".

3. When there is no response, ReputationDefender will "sometimes suggests that clients hire a lawyer. Emphasis mine to ensure I'm conveying the sheer drama of such a bold move.

4. No ??? - go direct to Profit!!!.

I always feel like an idiot when I read these sorts of articles - there's a lucrative living to be made out of the utterly self-evident. Perhaps I need to learn to *never* underestimate the desire of people to have other folks perform simple and obvious tasks for them for exorbitant fees.

Re:Repuation Defender - how it works

[westyx]

Well, you'd think so, but it's not as self evident as you'd think, especially if you're not technologically literate. Sure, I could google my name, but I'm not good with dealing with people (on or offline) and that's where these people come in.

Re:Repuation Defender - how it works

[Fnkmaster]

Well, that's a dismissive analysis, and that is only a portion of the business.

First of all, there is a technical problem of person-oriented search. This is a large part of finding content, both undesirable and otherwise, that refers to a particular person, and it is a rather complicated technical problem. It involves grouping together search engine results, and resolving a general co-reference problem across disparate types of content - how do you know that "John Smith" in one web page refers to "John Smith" in another web page? A combination of automation and human input is currently required, but this is an active area that ReputationDefender is involved in R&D for. This is more than just "Googling for your own name", as some have suggested in the past.

If you want to Google for your own name, by all means, go ahead, it's free, though often a good starting point. But that's different from the MyReputation service, which involves aggregating from a large number of sources (meta-search), prioritizing, clustering, annotating, and pushing intermittent updates on search results to clients. This may not be useful to everyone, but it is definitely quite useful to some people. We've heard many people say "Oh wow, I didn't know that was out there".

Secondly, removal efforts, which you describe, are one service that ReputationDefender offers. Even that service is substantially more nuanced than you make it sound - there is a database of techniques and practices that the services group has developed, and clients often do find this service to be valuable to them. Just because something isn't rocket science doesn't mean it's not useful to many people. Additionally, the fees for content removal efforts are by no means exorbitant.

There are other services offered by ReputationDefender as well, including higher priced offerings, that work quite differently and rely on making content less easily discoverable using SEO-related techniques, rather than actually seeking its removal. Again, those might not pique your interest, but there are quite a few satisfied customers who do think they are rather valuable.

As for the involvement of lawyers, it has only occurred in a very few cases. In cases with a strong legal mandate, ReputationDefender has in some cases been able to get law firms interested in representing clients who otherwise might not have been able to afford legal representation, and certainly not of the caliber than has become involved. Clients have been happy when they previously felt powerless about awful things being said about them, and suddenly found that their case was interesting enough to a group of high powered lawyers to take it on.

None of these things might seem valuable to you if you haven't been in a situation to need them before, or if you are so technically savvy as to need no help in any of these areas, but there are quite a few people who do find them useful.

By way of disclaimer, I am a consultant to ReputationDefender and a shareholder in the company, so I am surely biased on these matters, but I am open minded to legitimate critiques. But your description of what the company does is radically oversimplified.

Re:Repuation Defender - how it works

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps I need to learn to *never* underestimate the desire of people to have other folks perform simple and obvious tasks for them for exorbitant fees.

No, but you need to learn to understand that people don't have the time to perform all these "simple and obvious" tasks.[1]

When you are a CEO of a large corporation, with a family to take care of, how much time do you think you have left over to google the interwebs for potentially damaging information, contact the site owners, follow up on their responses, etc.?

It makes a lot more sense to hire an external consultant to do this job - they take the time so you don't have to, plus they probably know more than the average CEO about robots.txt, the Wayback Machine, Usenet (the 'net is not just the Web) and the Google cache.

[1] As a side note, this applies to most "simple and obvious" tasks the Slashdot crowd can think of - upgrading software, cleaning out spyware, picking a Linux distro, downloading it via a torrent, burning it to CD, then installing it and writing drivers for the wireless card...

I used to think like the parent poster, before I told my father to "just do it himself" when he needed help with his computer (he runs a small business) - four hours later, no progress, a frustrated father, and real actual productivity time lost - he could have made calls, written letters, made sales in those four hours, but he didn't, because he was busy trying to fix his computer. "He should learn how to use it before he tries to fix it" - yeah, great suggestion - when will he have the time for that?

Re:Repuation Defender - how it works

[teslar]

As for the involvement of lawyers, it has only occurred in a very few cases. In cases with a strong legal mandate, ReputationDefender has in some cases been able to get law firms interested in representing clients who otherwise might not have been able to afford legal representation, and certainly not of the caliber than has become involved.

Translation:

Even when we had strong cases, which does not happen often, we have failed to get law firms interested except in a select few cases but I am not going to tell you we won, which you can take to mean that we lost.

I don't mean to rain on your parade, but since you're specifically inviting critiques: this doesn't exactly sound like you've been very useful at all now, does it? You may want to work on the sales pitch here.

Re:Repuation Defender - how it works

[Fnkmaster]

No, you apparently mistook (or intentionally distorted) my vagueness as an attempt to conceal some underlying failure. In fact, that vagueness only means that I can't discuss any specifics nor do I really know enough to do so (I'm not involved in that side of the business).

The definition of "won" for clients is that they got rid of unwanted, misleading, unfair content out there about them, and we have many clients for whom we have successfully removed or neutralized content. We see it as a substantial positive if we reduce the number of clients who have to resort to filing lawsuits.

Not every case of undesirable information warrants legal action, and not every case is a viable candidate for legal action. In any case, legal referral is a last resort tool, not a first line service.

And as you probably know, the wheels of justice in the US turn rather slowly. I don't think it's plausible that any referred cases could have been seen through to completion in the time since ReputationDefender started doing business.

Re:Repuation Defender - how it works

[vic-traill]

Well, fair comment. I find your post much more informative than TFA. I suppose I knew there was more to it even as I read the article, but the article really did undersell the process, and as such I couldn't help but make a smartass comment. I think it was the presentation of the 'sometimes suggesting the hiring of a lawyer' - it just seem glib.

Your point is fair and understood.

Usenet

[ukemike]

Back when google was relatively new, and the internet was relatively small still, (we're talking late 90s) it occurred to be to search on my name. I was very surprised to find archived USENET posts from the late 80s and early 90s! Knowing that, I refined my searches and was shocked at the reckless things I had posted. It had not occurred to me that all of that was being archived.

Even then it was only possible because I have an unusual name, and I had an unusually early presence on the internet.

Now almost 10 years later, even I, with my better than average search skills and first hand knowledge of things like past email addresses and what groups I had posted in, CANNOT find most of that embarrassing stuff. It's just too buried. Though I imagine that someday soon some totally unheard of search engine with some radical new approach will make it easy to uncover all of that ancient sillyness. I guess I learned my "myspace" lesson early.

the cure for bad news is more news

[kerika]

This brings to mind a story I recently heard on NPR's On The Media. It was about how public webpostings made at age 19 can linger and retain the power to embarass years later. (Transcript of story http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2007/05/25/0 4here). In her heady youth, Ms. Rafsanjani (now a producer for OTM) wrote a letter to an Iranian newspaper defending America and attacking Iranian policies, and in the typical style of a teenager, her letter was idealistic, impassioned and over-the-top. It mortifies her to this day.

What was interesting to me about this piece was how, despite wishing she could supress the letter, Ms. Rafsanjani eventually became resigned to having this information out there, and although it embarassed her, she welcomed the opportunity to discuss it further on NPR, because it gave her a way to control the story. She wanted people who found that previous piece to know that her thinking had evolved, and that she no longer feels that way. I think that something similar is happening in the article you linked. Although she was unable to get her name off of that one blog, by participating in an article about using "reputation defenders," the first woman in the article is able to get the message out that SHE has changed, that she regrets the incident from her past, and that she wants people to know she is not bigoted. Whatever one thinks of the content of her claims (I don't know enough to say), I think that brings up an important point. The best way to handle certain potentially damaging bits of information in one's past, especially online, is not always to supress it. Sometimes the ideal situation is to go out there and use one's own name to defend oneself, to clarify one's point of view, and give one's own side of the story.

on the other hand

[Khashishi]

My name seems to bring up several scholars and doctors. Heh, it's not such a horrible association.

Re:on the other hand

[DeadChobi]

Musicians, and one mathematician for me. I'm not a particularly good musician, either.

Who would use this?

[8ball629]

I highly doubt anyone with a good grasp on the internet would pay for a service like this. I think most people know that places such as Google are not obligated to do anything.

If you can't get your information off of Google, is it even worth the effort? I think not.

AutoAdmit

[TheoMurpse]

AutoAdmit bills itself as "the most prestigious college admissions discussion board in the world." The law school section is just one big circle jerk of Harvard, Yale, and Stanford pricks who spend their time gossipping like old grandmas about how certain girls in their law schools are major sluts. They allegedly found out one girl at one of the schools was daughter of an international felon or something like that. An even bigger clusterfuck ensued.

The girl hired Reputation Defender, and it became an even larger clusterfuck; might I call it a mung universe?

Basically, I don't have anything meaningful to say other than Reputation Defender has the ability to turn a huge clusterfuck of pricks into an even bigger universe full of mung. Warning: the definitions are nastier than you could possibly imagine!

Re:AutoAdmit

[MLease]

Re: mung....

There are times I wish I weren't so damned curious. This is one of them.

-Mike

Backfire is so sweet!

[hondo77]

I had someone demand I remove a link to someone in a rather heavy-handed way. Oh yes, it backfired. I bought the .net domain of the person's name and posted the whole email exchange. For years my page ranked higher than her own domain. I just checked now and it's only down to #2 and I don't even own hername.net anymore. As for the guy who tried to sanitize things, I have a separate page for him and it is still #1 when you Google his name. Yeah, these things can backfire if not handled properly.

Re:Backfire is so sweet!

[glindsey]

I bought the .net domain of the person's name

This is actually a bit disturbing. I'm not lawyer, but as far as I can tell ICANN rules generally state that if somebody owns your name as a domain name, and uses it to post defamatory information about you, you can have the domain name turned over to you -- similar to the way trademark holders get domain names handed over to them. The problem? It costs $1500 to file a claim with the WIPO, a pittance for a business, but crippling for an individual. And forget about suing for libel or defamation, unless you're damned sure you can include court costs and attorneys' fees in the ruling.

This appears to make it trivially easy for anybody out there to buy a person's name as a domain, put an Internet smear-job out there, and just wait for Google to index it. Then again, maybe if everybody starts doing this all the time, the Web will be full of it and nobody will take any of it seriously.

Re:Backfire is so sweet!

[hondo77]

As I understand it, they can't get it back under that condition. If you have a legitimate use for the domain, which posting an email exchange is, as opposed to "Hey, if you want your domain back pay me $10,000", then you can keep the domain. But yes, it is trivially easy to do this. You just need to piss someone off enough to get them to do it. Hence the aforementioned "backfire".

Or you could do what I do...

[Anonymous Coward]

... and share your name with a celebrity.

Works every time. If I type my name into google, I have to go down between five and ten pages before I get to anything related to *me*.

Re:Or you could do what I do...

[clickclickdrone]

There's a celebrity called Anonymous Coward? Never heard of them.

Re:AutoAdmit (Mung)

[Kryptic Knight]

I just read the link
That is just unbelievably disgusting.

Please someone tell me that #1 is completely fictional.

Hardly New

[clickclickdrone]

Five years ago I got called in to see the boss and was told someone had posted information about our company on a popular investors forum. I thought what I had posted was quite innocent so fessed up. After much deliberation over the next few weeks, I managed to keep my job, mainly because I was open and honest about events.
However, what I found interesting was that they had for some time used a company in the US who use hoards of bored housewives to Google/MSN/whatever all day for company keywords looking for new stuff that could be investigated by the company. They also did a pretty smart job of cross-referencing and presented me with a thick pile of paper outlining all my internet activities over the previous 6 months, what I'd posted, where, when etc.

Oblig

[hmccabe]

The are several firms that now sell their services

Are there companies that clean up bad online grammer?

Re:Oblig

[mudshark]

There is most certainly an opportunity there for those who would check speling....

Mea Culpa

[hmccabe]

grammer

I guess that's what the Preview button is for.

Begging the question...

[T23M]

Who's going to bail out these sites' reputations?

A great way for evil people to protect themselves

[IanBolton]

There is already a reputation defender for when someone has said something defamatory about you: the law.

Failing that, a cheaper alternative is to present the truth instead. Anyone with a peculiar name should buy their own domain name, as this will come up high in google rankings, so you can have your say before others have theirs.

Trying to silence people's opinions of you never works in the long run, no matter how much money you throw at it. This is exactly how bullies survive and evade detection - by covering their tracks and spreading misinformation - but it is also how they are eventually caught, because they are irrational and don't think long-term. Companies like ReputationDefender exist purely to squeeze ill-gotten gains from evil people before they get caught.

In my experience, the more open you are, the better your life will be. Maybe not in the short-term, but definitely in the long-term, which is what matters.

SERMA (Search Engine Repuatation Management)

[adzoox]

I had a company that I wrote an article about on my blog do this - it really hurt my serach engine results for a while. It's very easy to counteract though ... A) Change the wording of the "reputation managed piece" B) If they create a gateway page - contact the ISP or search engines - this is usually a violation of a TOS agreement. C) Expose the company for doing it.

Dell is notorious for this - they did it extensively with the "exploding battery" issue.

An easier way...

[mattbee]

Why not just register a personal site with "your side" of whatever else people will find on the net? If you have got a personal site registered with your name at the top, you can guarantee that Google will ensure that's on the first page of their results, and you can explain yourself to anyone who might be interested in your past. That method is honest, permament, almost free and covers any kind of public indiscretion, heinous USENET posts, or just mistaken identity. I agree trying to "bury" information that Google already have on you is likely to end up looking even worse.

Re:An easier way...

[SuiteSisterMary]

That method is honest

Says who?

Re:An easier way...

[mattbee]

Heh, well, of course you can write what you want. But in the context of having information out there which you'd rather people didn't see, but which they *will* see, I was suggesting a potentially honest way of countering it. It's the way Google will *help* an individual counter bad information that it might return about them.

Re:An easier way...

[SuiteSisterMary]

And, sadly, it's the way that Google helps individuals counter correct, if unpleasant, information.

Just another place to apply spin, I'm afraid.

Sounds awefully Republican

[Anonymous Coward]

Goopers have been doing this stuff for over 30 years. Covering up treason, grand larceny, murder, etc, which are pretty much the cornerstones of the "conservative movement".

If America were to imprison every Gooper, the government would become a much less corrupt place practically overnight. I say we just call them "enemy combatants" and Get 'er Done!

Lame names

[ceeam]

ReputationDefender, DefendMyName... Meh. Lame. What about MinistryOfTruth?

Just hire an unscrupulous business to optimize

[The_mad_linguist]

the results of the site you don't want people to see. Odds are, the site'll get stuck in "Google hell", and then it's no problem to you.

So Ob I can't beleive it's not here yet

[mcmonkey]

My true name is, honestly... Dave Chappelle.

Could be worse. Your name could be Michael Bolton.

Re:So Ob I can't beleive it's not here yet

[brocktune]

Why should I change my name? He's the one who sucks.

We forever will be a masked society

[athloi]

As long as "what people think about what you said" is more important than "how accurate was what you said," smart people everywhere will hide what they think to the detriment of all. It's a habit of most dying things to first go into denial (except BSD, which is not dying).

We all have our pasts

[dekkerdreyer]

I don't see the big deal. We all have ghosts in our past, getting past them and moving on with our lives is what makes us human. Who hasn't gone bar hopping and picked up underage hookers? What guy hasn't cheated on his wife during late-night filming sessions? Who doesn't have a picture on flickr of themselves completely trashed with a dog licking peanut butter off of their dingle-berries.

I don't think any of these will interfere with my life in any way. Besides, any previous evidence of me touching underage children and cheating the system to make myself rich will just set me up for a lifetime position as a priest or politician.

Re:We all have our pasts

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever since day one online I have used my real name on purpose,mainly cause no-one else did and just to see what happened.

I have had serveral domain names which I posted online with my name beside,some content silly,some content people could never undertsand,some mean content and some business content.
I was supprised to find that when the names expired and they were bought by mega large companies,that after a few months they had had refference's to the domains removed from google groups and numerous places like forums etc.

I was supprised that they could have this information removed,I was all for it,I could not think of anything worse than running a company with some strange content posted by your trademark .com name 5 years ago.
I was supprised they even registered names with conflicting online content.I never would have done.

There is only one of me online,so I don't have problems with underage hookers.

I have given online problem people(trolls) my address calling their bluff and never seen them even drive by ,then again I will take on the world,and ofcoruse Nigeria.

It can be a real problem

[Anonymous Coward]

All it takes is one anonymous, bored dickhead who doesn't like your face for whatever silly reason - you argued with him on a mailing list, he doesn't like your forum post, whatever. It's trivial for someone to smear your name all over the place after that, and there usually isn't a hell of a lot you can do about it. The tech saavy crowd knows not to take any of it too seriously, but imagine interviewing for a job, the boss googles your name, and up comes some crap on encyclopedia dramatica or some geocities site. Does the average guy whose knowledge of the internet is next to nil really understand that it's all a joke? Probably not. Even if he does he's going to wonder what this guy did to piss someone off that much. It just looks bad.

Some sites may remove the content if you complain often and loudly enough, but others won't, especially places like ED that exist for the single purpose of stirring up shit.

One thing you can do is just bombard google with other references to your name all over the place. Make an innocent myspace page (myspace has a high pagerank) with a bland, boring profile and use your real name. Make geocities pages that reference your name, make blogs, whatever it takes. Make sure they all reference each other, but include enough "legitimate" content that it doesn't get interpreted as a spam site. Not hard to do, just make lists of your pets or hobbies like it's an old personal page you long since abandoned. Drown out the smear attempts with so much crap that the smear attempts get pushed to the bottom. Once someone sees that the first couple of hits for your name are just boring abandoned blogs and stuff they're not going to dig much further.

In Soviet Russia ....

[PPH]

...online comments bury you!

(Crap! Now I've got to pay to get all those stupid Obligatory posts taken down.)

Professor Ivan Perry reputation backfire

[Anonymous Coward]

The unnamed bullying "Cork Ireland Professor" in the Wall Street Journal article must regret using ReputationDefender, who succeeded in having him named as Professor Ivan Perry at http://www.geocities.com/stuartdneilson/Reputation DefenderInc.htm http://bulliedacademics.blogspot.com/2007/01/reput ation-defender-to-consider-bullied.html http://bulliedacademics.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_ar chive.htmlhttp://www.indymedia.ie/article/81398> http://www.iol.ie/~stuartneilson/bullying/ http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=6377 57&mc=4&forum_id=2

That is impressive results for a few dollars.

Different Logins

[MrSteveSD]

It's a good idea to use different user names for different things to prevent people building up a huge picture about you. Certainly don't use a contraction of your real name as your userID.

Great service!

[owidder]

See my small cartoon: http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2007/06 /online_wash.html Bye, Oliver

some of these efforts can backfire

[IwantToKeepAnon]

> However, some of these efforts can backfire, as the act to get it
> taken down can sometimes draw more attention than the offending
> content in the first place."

Ever hear of "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" on /.?
Might never had, or not quite so loud, if it weren't for the "surpression"
attempt in the first place.

The best way to clean up your image is to not sully it in the first place.

Business Plan

[PPH]

1) Create an on-line forum where users can post miscellaneous random thoughts (like /.).
2) Wait a few years while users post more and more bizzare comments.
3) Start another business that will clean up content when users start having regrets.
4) ????
5) Profit!