Boston Globe Profiles ReputationDefender, Online Reputation Management

The Boston Globe recently ran a thought provoking story in their Sunday Ideas section that highlights ReputationDefender and other thought leaders in online identity. The piece is quite good and worth reading in its entirety, but some of the highlights include topics that the ReputationDefender Blog has covered for some time. Drake Bennett begins his article by noting that College Gossip site Juicy Campus is closing and goes on to note the new and sometimes harmful ways that electronic speech is travelling through cyberspace and changing the ways legal and technical experts are thinking about online rumor, lies and innuendo.

Speech now travels farther faster than the Founding Fathers – or the judges who created much of modern free speech law – could have dreamed. The Web has brought a new reach to the things we say about others, and created a vast potential audience for arguments that would once have unfolded in a single room or between two telephones. It has eaten away at the buffer that once separated public and private, making it possible to expose someone else’s intimate information to the world with a few keystrokes, or to take information that would formerly have been filed away in obscure public records and present it digestibly as a goad to collective political action.

One of the results has been the advent of a new culture of online heckling and shaming, and the rise of enormous cyber-posses motivated by social or political causes – or simple sadism.

Now, some legal scholars are beginning to argue that new technologies have changed the balance of power between the right to speak and the right to be left alone. At conferences, in law review articles, and, increasingly, in the courts, some lawyers are suggesting that the time has come to rethink some of the hallowed protections that the law gives speech in this country, especially if that speech is online. The proposals vary: Some focus on restricting material that can be posted online or how long it can stay there, others on whether we should be less willing to protect online anonymity. More ambitious schemes would have courts treat a person’s reputation as a form of property – something to be protected, traded, and even sold like any other property – or create a legally enforceable duty of confidentiality between friends like that which exists between doctors and their patients.

The article also correctly mentions that the information about individuals online is now easily found through search engines like Google:

Not only does the Web allow for anonymous, immediate posting of information, but search engines make that information retrievable for curious people everywhere. And whether it’s an address, a lewd photograph or video, or a written insult, it remains on the Web until someone actively removes it, and even then copies can survive elsewhere.

ReputationDefender is highlighted as the market leader in the Online Reputation Management industry and Michael Fertik is sourced as an expert in this field:

There are already responses, both legal and otherwise, for people who want to fight back against online assaults on their reputation. They can pay a company – one called ReputationDefender is perhaps the best known – to track down any information about them online and to then attempt to have it taken down.

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According to Michael Fertik, a lawyer and the founder of ReputationDefender, even in Germany, a country where it’s far easier to sue for breaches of privacy and where websites are held liable for user content, the Web has not been reduced to a timorous, anodyne place – and there’s still plenty of online gossip.

“There are sex websites, there are complain-about-your-boyfriend websites,” he says. “Twenty percent of our customers are in Germany.”

As technical and legal minds debate the future of online anonymous speech, ReputationDefender will continue to advocate for free speech, privacy and safety for all online users.