One of Google’s mantras since Day 1 has been “Don’t be evil.” People have generally applauded this unique (albeit vague) corporate philosophy, as a refreshing new way of approaching business. It goes a long way into showing the rest of the world what the mindset is within the Googleplex.
But, ah yes, when you bring up “evil” you inevitably invite a philosophical discussion. Starting broadly, what is “evil”? For that matter, what is “good” (for if there is an evil, there must be an opposite, right?)? We’ll spare you the pondering and just point out why we’re posting today:
Google has murdered the AdSense account run by one of the web’s most influential anti-Scientology sites.
Yesterday, the search giant cut off all ads served to Enturbulation, a fledgling site dedicated to promoting activism against the Church of Scientology and all its related organizations.
The above quote is a grab from an article that is appearing in The Register, out of the United Kingdom.
Enturbulation is considered to be something of a “home” for the now infamous Anonymous movement, which attacks Scientology. While it would be fun to play tin-foil hat and start coming up with some sinister plot involving L. Ron Hubbard controlling Google, a more sensible explanation can be found in Google’s new AdSense policies which state that partner sites may not include “advocacy against any individual, group, or organization.”
It’s an interesting move by Google, and one that is similar to actions by YouTube (which Google also owns) last month. In that instance, YouTube (easily the most popular video site on the Internet) deleted an account run by Mark Bunker, a well-known TV journalist and anti-Scientology activist. YouTube’s official line is that it destroyed Bunker’s video channel because he had a previous account suspended for violations of site policy.
Regular readers of the ReputationDefender blog will remember this post which highlighted the Online Reputation Management inquiries ReputationDefender has received from across the globe. The post also highlighted RD employee Adam, who proudly wore his ReputationDefender shirt across Thailand in order to spread the word about Online Reputation Management.
Recently, another ReputationDefender employee, Michelle, returned from her European vacation with photos of her proudly evangelizing the RD brand in Paris and Italy. I’m sure the international fashionistas were in awe of those stylish threads.
Are there any international readers of this blog? We’d love to hear from you in the comments. Tell us how ReputationDefender defends your reputation and gives you an Edge across the globe.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao hugely popular at home for his visits to quake-hit Sichuan, has emerged as the 10th most popular politician on the Facebook social networking site.
Wen’s response to the Chinese earthquake is said to have fuelled his internet popularity, garnering him over 20,000 online fans.
In response to the suicide death of 13-year-old Meghan Meier, state lawmakers in Missouri have given final approval to a bill making cyber bullying illegal. Meier is at the center of a pending case that transpired when the mother of one of her friends wanted to know if Meghan was saying negative things about her daughter and allegedly created a false profile on MySpace in the name of a non-existent 16-year-old boy. Eventually this fictitious boy, “Josh Evans,” ended his online relationship with Meghan, which is believed to have been the catalyst that led to the young girl taking her life.
The bill, which was recently signed by the Governor, updates existing state laws against harassment to be more relevant with current technological developments. Specifically, the new bill removes the requirement that the communication considered to be harassment be written or over the telephone. Supporters of the move say the updated bill will now cover harassment from electronic devices like computers and text messages.
Many of the provisions contained in the bill arose from a special gubernatorial task force that studied Internet harassment after the details of Megan Meier’s suicide were made public.
The mother who allegedly created the profile, Lori Drew, has been indicted in California on federal counts of conspiracy and accessing protected computers without authorization to get information used to inflict emotional distress on the teen. As we reported earlier, an attorney for Drew is preparing a legal challenge to the prosecution’s claims.
Police in Missouri did not initially file any charges against Drew largely because there was no applicable state law to prosecute her actions under. While the outcome of the current case is uncertain, Sen. Scott Rupp has stated that the proposed amendments would have allowed prosecutors to continue investigating without having to ship the case to a different state.
“Without a good, quality cyber stalking and harassment law, which we don’t currently have, we have to go to federal courts in other states to make a stretching leap argument,” said Rupp, R-Wentzville.
Other senators have seen the proverbial handwriting on the wall, and our coming out with their own interpretations. State Sen. Harry Kennedy, D-St. Louis, said the law is “definitely a warning shot for those folks who want to use the Internet for harassment.”
This is another example of how 20th century case law is unfit to deal with the realities of the digital age. Anti Bullying advocates, parents and concerned netizens, while saddened at this event, can be pleased with the outcome and new state law.
Both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times recently reported that a federal judge has ordered internet search giant Google to turn over the viewing records of YouTube as part of a billion dollar lawsuit alleging copyright infringement. The records will reveal the usernames and IP addresses of every YouTube viewer since 2005 and while Viacom has stated that it will not use the data to go after individuals for copyright infringement, the ruling has privacy advocates concerned. Quoting from the New York Times:
“Users should have the right to challenge and contest the production of this deeply private information,” said Kurt Opsahl, senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group.
[SNIP]
Mr. Opsahl also said that even records that did not include a user’s login name and I.P. address might be able to be associated with specific people.
The EFF responds in the LA Times, as well:
The group said the ruling would “allow Viacom to see what you are watching on YouTube,” and it urged Viacom “to back off this overbroad request and Google to take all steps necessary to challenge this order and protect the rights of its users.”
Viacom, which owns Comedy Central, MTV, Paramount and other media channels, is concerned about losing revenue when clips from South Park or the Colbert Report are posted on video sharing sites. Both Viacom and Google say they are open to a compromise that does not reveal user IP addresses, but instead displays viewing trends through randomly assigned numbers.
It is clear that people are concerned about keeping their browsing habits anonymous.
ReputationDefender is committing to keeping private information off of the internet. MyPrivacy helps prevent your sensitive data from being revealed online.
There has been quite a bit of press about Online Reputation Management and how people are increasingly forming opinions based on what they find online.
The New York Post has a nice write up of ReputationDefender and the Online Reputation Management industry as a whole. Quoting from the piece:
“Whether you like it or not, your resume isn’t a piece of paper anymore. It’s your top 10 Google search results,” says Michael Fertik, CEO and founder of one such company, ReputationDefender.
[SNIP]
For fees ranging from 10 bucks for a credit-check-like comprehensive Web search to a $2,000 monthly charge for a full-frontal assault on demeaning content, reputation managers generally use two strategies: they either try to eliminate content altogether or conceal it in the bowels of a search engine’s results.
[Michael] Fertik’s firm will attempt to persuade owners of Web pages to remove humiliating posts or pictures for $30 per item. They use a process that tracks down Web hosts and contacts them in a “non-threatening” manner. The system works “nicely,” he says.
Now you can employ the services, for a fee, of course, of businesses that will keep an eye on your online reputation and help you keep it clean. One of the pioneers in this field, ReputationDefender, goes on a search-and-destroy mission. This organization scours the Internet to dig up every bit of information on you and then sets out to destroy (at your request) any negative information by getting it corrected or removed, whenever possible.
Sautter and Crompton encourage people — whether they’re job searching or not — to remember that everything they do online leaves a digital footprint. It’s up to each individual to determine whether those footprints take a step in the right — or wrong — direction in cyberspace.
And finally, Boston.com recently ran a piece that looked at the potential pitfalls that doctors face online. The article points out that while there are many safeguards in place to protect patient data, many doctors are exposed on the web.
“There may be slanderous information about a physician on the Web, published in a blog or on a Web page, by a vengeful patient, colleague, or ex-lover,” Dr. Tristan Gorrindo and Dr. James E. Groves write in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “Equally vexing, there may be slanderous information published about someone with the same name as an unlucky physician.”
Medical professionals as well as other executives are urged to be proactive in claiming their webutation and controlling what people find when they are searched.
Facebook, already one of the world’s largest and most successful social networks, is constantly seeking ways to improve on itself. Hats off to you, boys (and girls); that’s admirable. Improving user interaction and satisfaction is something a lot of sites ignore once they go “big time.”
Part of their push to improve things is through the use of applications on your Facebook profile. These applications look fairly benign and offer a variety of little gadgets. Wanna sip virtual cocktails with someone? They’ve got an ap for that. Wanna play Oregon Trail (er, Northwestern Trail) like you’re in 3rd grade again? They’ve got that available, and many more, all available at the click of your mouse.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? Giving people more, for free. However, there is no such thing as a free lunch in sunny Silicon Valley, and in this instance that fact remains especially true. The thing about those Facebook applications that many people don’t realize is that when you add it to your profile you are giving the developers of those applications access to all the information in your profile.
MSNBC has recently written about this and we’ve grabbed some of the more poignant bits for you below:
In February, MySpace also opened up to developers. It has more than 1,000 applications. The company, along with other social networks such as Hi5 and AOL’s Bebo, allows applications under OpenSocial, a Google-led initiative that lets developers distribute games and other programs across multiple social networks.
Each site has come up with its own policies on the data that developers are allowed to see. MySpace, the largest social network, with 110 million members, said developers can see users’ public details — name, profile picture and friend lists — when they download a program. When a user installs one on Facebook, which has 70 million members, the developer can see everything in a profile except contact information, as well as friends’ profiles. Members can limit what is seen by changing privacy controls, and both companies say developers are allowed to keep those data for only 24 hours.
Developers can collect other data from members once they’ve download the applications.
{SNIP}
About 90 percent of the applications have unnecessary access to private data.
And, as the woman who compiled all this data is quick to point out, once the data has been transferred to a 3rd party server Facebook can do nothing to control the information.
If that’s not enough to scare the scrabble out of you, there’s a security risk as well, as the article notes:
But revealing information on quizzes or maps of places visited, for instance, may also make it easier for strangers to piece together tidbits to create larger security threats,
Some online activities ask users to list pets’ names or to display their high school’s mascot, answers to common security questions asked by financial companies.
In the modern world where Internet privacy is paramount you have to educate yourself about every move you make online.
I am very excited about the new website, back-end, and functionality ReputationDefender just released (unleashed?!) this week. We are providing our members with greatly enhanced usability and many new and long-requested features.
One of my favorite features of the new system is the “quick action” buttons that allow users to ignore, remove, or add items within their reports with only a single click. Also we’ve launched a shopping cart for Destroy assistance, so you can order multiple items to be removed at once. And now you can add more family members to your account to give your people maximum control over their personal data.
Jennifer Leggio has quite the scoop over at ZDnet. They recently broke a story concerning ReputationDefender and Enterprise Level Online Reputation Management. The story itself is quite good and worth a read to get all the details.
“Our fully branded enterprise product will include many of the services we already offer but with more frequent reports,” Tripp said. “We’ll be able to do searches around the enterprise or executives and will track even how employees are publicly discussing the company. ”
The enterprise reputation management product was built on the same principles of the MyReputation product, which scrapes the open Web — and what ReputationDefender calls the “invisible Web” — and presents a report of all findings. With the personal services only, if the report shows the individual anything he or she finds to be libelous, damaging or untrue, ReputationDefender will then go into action to try to get the potentially defamatory information stricken from the Web. The company will not do destroys for enterprises or organizations.
Beyond monitoring and reporting, however, Tripp says that a key part of enterprise reputation management is proactively inserting a company’s desired image into every layer of the Web. Part of this service will include helping enterprises do just that — ensuring that the major search engines always show the desired results.
“The first 10 or 15 things we see on a search engine are going to help shape our perception of a company. Proactive enterprise reputation management is far beyond issuing press releases and it can’t be achieved with just standard SEO, either. It’s about figuring out key vulnerabilities in the way a firm is presented online and addressing them and managing them head on,” Tripp said.
“You can’t just look at the name of a firm and the name of the products or even just the names of the officers. In considering how your company strategy is presented, you need to look at who your officers are and what their roles are in how each of them are portrayed in all facets of the Web,” he said. “If you want your enterprise presence and message to be pervasive and part of your company lure you need to have it perfectly optimized.”
ReputationDefender looks forward to working with corporations in the future and bringing enterprise level online reputation management solutions to companies around the globe. And special thanks to the newshounds over at ZDNet, who got wind of this before anyone else.
eputationDefender has been the leader in worldwide Online Reputation Management since its founding a little over two years ago. ReputationDefender is pleased to have received inquiries from over 38 countries across the globe and has done business on every continent except Antarctica (If any of you south pole researchers are looking to spruce up your online presence, we would be happy to give you an Edge). From Africa to Europe and beyond, ReputationDefender has helped people around the world become anonymous online and help block unwanted email.
Our employees are also global citizens and frequently travel the world for both business and pleasure. Recently an RD worker named Adam wound up in Thailand for his summer vacation and proudly proselytized the ReputationDefender brand during his trip.
Nice work, Adam. Any other international RepDef fans out there? Whether you are south of the border or across the pond, we’d love to hear from you!
The Wall Street Journal recently ran an interesting piece entitled “The Downsides To Blogging About Your Kid,” in which Cybele Weisser discusses the possible pitfalls associated with Cyber Parenting. She runs a blog with public photos of her son. The internet allows friends and family to watch the child grow up.
Sometimes, though, the site also serves as an unfortunate reminder of the Internet’s not-so-innocent side. A few days ago, for instance, I noticed that some of the recent photos we’d posted had an extraordinary number of views, the result of people searching for keywords such as “bedtime, “nursing,” and “pj’s.”
Privacy concerns stemming from the public display of family photos include Cyber Stalking and balancing the protection of children online with wanting to share their development with loved ones. Other points of view brought up in the piece and in the comments include making a website private to keep predatory web surfers out of your digital family life and concerns that this album could prove embarrasing to the child as he matures.
What do you think? Are parenting blogs putting children at risk? Are we over exposing the intimate details about our lives? And when the kids grow up, will they ever live down their baby blog?
Until recently, the Internet has been an open playground: You could do whatever you liked, and if you did something wrong you got in trouble after the fact. But now politicians and others are pushing to make intermediaries, like ISPs and auction sites, filter content before it gets to users. The Internet of the future might be an Internet with limits on what you can do.
As always, I’m guest-blogging and I don’t represent the views of ReputationDefender.
Most recently, three major ISPs–Verizon, Sprint, and Time Warner Cable–recently bowed to pressure from the Attorney General of the state of New York and agreed to stop carrying Usenet newsgroups that contain child pornography and other reprehensible content.
First, a brief history lesson: “Usenet” is a throwback to the early days of the Internet. It is a set of discussion areas–”newsgroups–that were very popular in the 1990s as a way to discuss everything from programming to politics. In more recent years, the popularity of Usenet has fallen the Web (what you’re using right now) became more important. But, some people still communicate through Usenet. And a small fraction of those people use it to send child pornography and other illegal material to each other.
Verizon, Sprint, and Time Warner Cable stopped “hosting” some Usenet newsgroups on their own servers. As a result, the ISPs are no longer providing access directly to subscribers. It’s still possible for subscribers of those ISPs to access the newsgroups, such as by paying $10 to $20 per month for access through a web-based Usenet gateway (a service that shows Usenet through a web browser). A good analogy to what these ISPs did would be if your ISP no longer provided email service and you had to pay another company for web-based email.
This is one of the first times that a major ISP has limited its services on the basis of content. While any customer can still access any newsgroup they want, the ISP has made it substantially more difficult to access newsgroups that contain illegal content. Some think this is the first step toward ISPs enforcing content controls based on other forms of illegal content, like music or video file sharing and possibly even going as far as restricting the transmission of libelous or false information online.
Current laws, combined with the nature of the Internet, put a lot of pressure on ISPs to filter content. Because the Internet is global, harmful and illegal content can easily be found overseas. U.S. politicians can’t control what overseas websites do, since U.S. courts lack jurisdiction over many foreign websites, and even if there were jurisdiction it would be a nightmare to try to try to enforce the laws overseas. But, U.S. politicians know that every web user has to use an ISP to get online. And they know that ISPs that serve the U.S. are subject to U.S. law and can easily be dragged into U.S. courts. Even more importantly in this case, it’s a lot easier to go after a handful of ISPs than it is to try to track down and locate many anonymous Usenet users who posted the original illegal images. Thanks to anonymity services like TOR, it may be completely impossible to locate the people who first put the underage images on Usenet. But, the government can find the major ISPs just by looking in the phone book. It’s a lot easier to go after the known intermediary than it is to chase down foreign or anonymous wrongdoers.
The U.S. isn’t the only country where intermediaries–like ISPs–are being held liable for wrongdoing by other users. A recent court case in France held eBay liable for fake handbags sold by independent sellers on eBay. Again, the reasoning went that it’s easier to force eBay to solve the problem than it is to chase down many small-time sellers of fake handbags.
Is this the first step toward extensive filtering, going as far as ISPs stopping the transmission of sites that contain libelous or hurtful materials? It’s technically possible for this to happen. Spam blacklists already exist. And lots of programs — like McAffee’s “SiteAdvisor” — already detect some forms of malware and provide warnings to users before proceeding. Google already warns users about pages that might be dangerous, based on their own internal blacklist. And some ISPs already block certain emails under the guise of being viruses or spam.
Adding another filter for sites that have been ranked as hurtful or libelous by enough users would just be another simple step, nothing more than a Digg-like button “bury as inaccurate” for the world. It’s entirely possible that ISPs could display a message that “this site has been marked as inaccurate by 40% of visitors.” We’re really not that far away from having this capability: sites like StumbleUpon use a Firefox extension to rate literally millions of websites.
Of course, what about the First Amendment? After all, the government can’t just censor all speech that it doesn’t like. But, the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that child pornography is not protected under the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has also held that libel–malicious lies about a private individual–is also given not protected under the First Amendment. So, under current law, it’s at least theoretically possible for a state government (like New York in the case of child pornography on Usenet) to threaten ISPs to stop providing access to some kinds of objectionable content. Of course, if government-mandated web filtering ever became common then we’d likely see another challenge in the Supreme Court, possibly with a different outcome.
In the end, it’s not clear whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. There’s plenty of things, like child pornography, that is so disgusting that something needs to be done to stop its spread. And, this most recent move by the New York ISPs suggests that illegal images are still prevalent, despite many attempts by law enforcement to find and prosecute the people who take them. And ISP warning for libelous or hurtful content might save thousands of reputations from unfair But, ISP filtering is also dangerous if it’s applied overzealously to things like file-sharing: there are plenty of forms of file-sharing that are legal (for example, many downloads of the Linux operating system use file-sharing networks to speed up downloads and to allow many users to download updated versions at the same time). Filtering could also be abused for political purposes, but it’s unlikely that the Supreme Court would allow it.
What do you think? Is this the end of the open playground? A step toward moral responsibility for ISPs? Or plain old censorship?
* As always, I’m guest-blogging by invitation, I don’t necessarily represent the views of ReputationDefender or any of its headcount, and I hope to start a discussion rather than providing definite answers.
Regular readers of the ReputationDefender Blog will remember this post about Indian Schools posting student records online for employers and universities to see. Now, a recent article from Australia’s venerable Courier Mail highlights another new policy by school officials to publicly post all student files for anyone to see:
The intranet database, dubbed OneSchool, will profile each of the state’s 480,000 public school students enrolled from Prep to Year 12.
Photographs, personal details, career aspirations, off-campus activities and student performance records are being collected from all 1251 state schools.
Some parents are understandably concerned about this initiative, questioning the rationale behind such a bold new program. They cite concerns about the availability of the information to inappropriate parties such as pedophiles and hackers. One reader commenting on the article suggested that personal information from the politicians who support the measure, along with that of their wives and children, be posted first as a test to determine if it safe before adding school children.
Using more of a stick than a carrot, Education Minister Rod Welford is quoted as saying that parents who refuse to supply information about their children for the database could find their children denied access to public education, and that the program, dubbed OneSchool is “non-negotiable.”
While the centralization of records and databases is a necessary thing in order to facilitate information sharing, it comes with a cost, and the child’s reputation moves online, as well as off. At what point does the availability of information outweigh the security risks inherent in making it more widely available?
In response to the rash of false identities on MySpace, the company has requested users to send a video to admins of the real users saying their MySpace ID tag.
An ingenious YouTube user has taken this as an opportunity to compile the many faces of MySpace (which are predominantly young girls with bangs and lots of eye shadow). Enjoy!
* A political blogger has announced that he is attempting to “Googlebomb” John McCain in an attempt to influence the 2008 presidential election. By “Googlebombing,” he’s attempting to manipulate the Google search engine so that certain negative links about John McCain appear higher up in a search for “John McCain” and similar searches. He’s doing this by placing links around the Internet in an attempt to make the negative articles appear more popular than they actually are, in the hope of getting Google’s search algorithm to rank them higher than positive articles about John McCain. He hopes to change the results enough that the first page of Google will be filled with negative links about John McCain, instead of the mixed positive and negative links that appear there now.
[Editor’s note: Since we don’t want to impact his campaign one way or the other, we’re applying the “nofollow” attribute to any link related to his Googlebomb. The “nofollow” tells Google to ignore the links and not consider them in its rankings.]
This is a pretty big development. It’s not the first time that Google has been an important part of a presidential campaign. For example, Ron Paul’s supporters tried very hard to keep positive information about their candidate at the top of a Google search for “Ron Paul.” They were so confident that they would be able to keep positive information about their candidate at the top of a Google search that they rented a blimp that instructed viewers to “Google Ron Paul.” And it’s not the first time that the White House has been the subject of a Google bomb; there was once a rather famous googlebomb that tried to make George W. Bush appear at the top of a search for “miserable failure.”
But, this is the first time that there has been a public attempt to influence a presidential election by artificially inflating the negative publicity surrounding a candidate through a Googlebomb. Some people think it’s a dirty trick. Other people think it’s a natural part of a modern political campaign. Either way, it’s a trend we haven’t seen the end of.
It’s also especially powerful because it allows candidates to campaign negatively without looking like they are running a negative campaign. It’s possible to launch a completely anonymous Googlebomb, unlike most other forms of negative campaigning. Candidates can get all the benefits of a negative campaign without having to face the backlash that usually follows attack ads.
It’s also possible that this will lead to an arms race on the Internet between campaigns. Right now, opponents of John McCain are dropping a negative Googlebomb against him. It’s possible that his supporters will respond by trying to bomb positive results back to the top of Google and by attacking Barrack Obama through a negative googlebomb of their own.
Is a campaign tactic that will become commonplace in the future, a dirty political trick, or both?
If you’ve been a target of a Googlebomb, it’s not too late to restore your online image. Services like MyEdge can be a first step toward getting your good name back.
* As always, I’m proud to be guest-blogging and my views don’t necessarily represent those of ReputationDefender or its employees.
