Entries from May 2008 ↓

We were delighted by some excellent coverage from Sonja Carberry and the team at Investor’s Business Daily.  The thoughtful article communicates one of the key pieces of an effective online reputation management strategy: be sure to always be vigilant and check in on your own reputation report at least once a month.  As we often tell our customers, even if you’re not posting anything special about yourself, you may not know what others are posting about you until it’s too late.

Yesterday, at a Memorial Day gathering, I spoke with a friend about precisely this type of problem.  She is a modest user of the Internet and had always been careful to distribute digital pictures of herself to only her close friends and family.  Imagine her surprise when a picture of her from a costume party ended up on a blog chronicling professional women behaving badly!  Fortunately for her, she noticed the picture before her very high profile employer did and the item has been taken down.  If she had simply let that picture sit out on the blog, who knows who might have noticed it and copied it to another site or emailed it on to her boss.

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Today is a good day for privacy advocates everywhere. The Internet Archive, a virtual library of the Internet, has won in a monumental struggle with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In November of last year the FBI sent a letter to the founder of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, demanding extremely sensitive personal information about innocent people without any prior court approval. The letter was sent as a National Security Letter, or NSL, and included a gag order barring Kahle from talking to anyone other than his lawyers about the request.

The NSL program, unknown to many Americans, allows the FBI and other U.S. government agencies to issue administrative subpoenas to U.S. businesses for customer and other personal information. It was begun shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Instead of complying with the invasive request, Kahle, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit to challenge the subpoena, arguing that the NSL program is unconstitutional.

The FBI withdrew the NSL on April 22, but FBI assistant director John Miller issued a statement about the case Wednesday. “The information requested in the national security letter was relevant to an ongoing, authorized national security investigation,” he said. “National security letters remain indispensable tools for national security investigations and permit the FBI to gather the basic building blocks for our counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigations.”

We’ve written previously on this topic, in this post on NSA data mining.  More information from Wired here.

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Today, I’m back in Louisville, Kentucky birthplace of ReputationDefender. It was in Cherokee Park that the idea of RD first popped into my head. Alright, enough nostalgia.

I’ve got a few interesting meetings lined up here this week. More soon from the road!

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Regular readers of this blog will recall that we’ve posted a few articles documenting the harmful effects of online hate speech, so if the following story sounds familiar, it should.

CNN is reporting that anonymous, online gossip is taking an enormous toll on our nation’s young people. “Jane,” a college freshman in New York, who asked that her real identity be withheld, has suffered psychologically, emotionally and even physically after her name was linked to salacious rumors on a college gossip site. Anonymous commenters have called the 18 year old student racist, ugly and “overrated.” Jane claims the rumors are untrue, but like other internet nastiness, the meaner the language, the more page views their posts generate and the more damage they cause to an individual’s reputation.

Just how damaging is this digital hate? Jane says that after reading the slander, “she felt like she had been kicked in the stomach.”

[Jane] called her parents in the middle of the night crying. She has lost weight, has trouble sleeping, and has become suspicious of those around her. She told me that it has ruined her freshman year — and will likely taint her entire college experience.

So what, if any, recourse does Jane have? She can hire a reputation management firm to help her craft a more becoming online image, or she can litigate, an option that is too time consuming and expensive for most students.

The CNN piece concludes by documenting the outdated case law that surrounds anonymous online hate. It notes, correctly, that the First Amendment protects free and even unpopular speech and that anonymous speech is also protected. Current case law does not allow for defamatory information to be spread freely, online or in the real world.

To successfully sue the posters, Jane would have to show that they made false and defamatory statements about her (racist and slutty would qualify, I think) published them to a third party (I read them) and that her reputation was damaged (check).

In fact, most jurisdictions also recognize “per se” defamation, where the allegations are presumed to cause damage to the plaintiff, such as attacks on a person’s professional character or standing.

What do you think? Is this harmless online gossip or actionable defamation?

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News from Facebook last week on their new product, Facebook Connect:

Today we are announcing Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect is the next iteration of Facebook Platform that allows users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site. This will now enable third party websites to implement and offer even more features of Facebook Platform off of Facebook – similar to features available to third party applications today on Facebook.

It seems they were hot on the heels of their competitor, MySpace, who released their new, similar product initiative, MySpace Data Availability only the day before:

MySpace, the world’s most popular social network, alongside Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter, today announced the launch of the MySpace ‘Data Availability’ initiative, a ground-breaking offering to empower the global MySpace community to share their public profile data to websites of their choice throughout the Internet. Today’s announcement throws open the doors to traditionally closed networks by putting users in the driver’s seat of their data and Web identity. The launch of the Data Availability initiative marks the first time that a social Website has enabled its community to dynamically share public profile information with other sites.

And today Google has jumped into the fray with an announcement of Friend Connect:

Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social — and now they can be, easily. With Google Friend Connect, any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming — picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.

So it seems that all the big players in the social networking game are really trying to solve the troublesome matter of identity as it pertains to Web 2.0. Techdirt has a nice write up on the evolution of the “walled garden” social networks and points out the the privacy concerns that go along with aggregating so much personal data across several websites. Users, too, face choices in the constantly changing social sphere. How much personal data are they willing to share with websites? Do the benefits of increased connectivity outweigh the potential risks?

ReputationDefender supports these new developments in the social networking realm and looks forward to a solution to online reputation management that is both functional and secure.

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