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

[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: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.

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

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!

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.