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."

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.

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 [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.

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.

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

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: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.

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...

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...

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

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

[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.