Companies That Clean Up Bad Online Reputations 180
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."
The Streisand Effect (Score:5, Informative)
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?
Re:That explains it (Score:1, Informative)
Interesting ... (Score:3, Informative)
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,
Here is the full article [itworldcanada.com].
Re:This has been happening for years... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Backfire is so sweet! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Repuation Defender - how it works (Score:5, Informative)
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.