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."

Suspicion

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

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

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

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

Re:Suspicion

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...

Disturbing

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

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.

it's true

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

The goatse family

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

ReputationDefender and DefendMyName Suck!

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

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

Logic

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...

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

This can extend beyond personal reputations..

.. 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

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 [archive.org].

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

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.

Careful there Vicar

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.

Employees/Employers

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.

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

My /. comment history

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?

That explains it

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

been there done that

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

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 [wikipedia.org], 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?

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

Their motto

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

and

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

Interesting ...

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 [itworldcanada.com].

hehe.... "backfires"...

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 [google.com]
Looks like it sure worked!

Nice Try

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...

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

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

Could be worse. Your name could be Michael Bolton.

Same Service, Secretly

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

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.

Google Approved?

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...

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

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

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.

the cure for bad news is more news

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 4 [onthemedia.org]here). 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.

Who would use this?

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

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 [urbandictionary.com]. Warning: the definitions are nastier than you could possibly imagine!

Backfire is so sweet!

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.

Hardly New

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

The are several firms that now sell their services

Are there companies that clean up bad online grammer?

Begging the question...

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

A great way for evil people to protect themselves

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)

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...

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.

Lame names

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

Just hire an unscrupulous business to optimize

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.

In Soviet Russia ....

...online comments bury you!

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

Different Logins

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!

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

Business Plan

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!

Re:This has been happening for years...

Mr. Kutaragi? I thought you retired?

Re:This has been happening for years...

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 [sourcewatch.org].

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:Or you could do what I do...

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