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?

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.

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?

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.