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

[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

[h2g2bob]

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

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.

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

[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

[neonmonk]

What a fabulous idea!

*holds breath*

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

[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.

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!)

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).

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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!

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...

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: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: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.

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.

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!

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: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.

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.