NewsWeek Writes Up ReputationDefender, Online Reputation Management

A recent article in Newsweek covers the online ordeals of the Catsouras family, who have been trying to manage unwanted photos of their daughter online.

This is a story about a photo—an image so horrific we can’t print it in NEWSWEEK. The picture shows the lifeless body of an 18-year-old Orange County girl named Nikki Catsouras, who was killed in a devastating car crash on Halloween day in 2006. The accident was so gruesome the coroner wouldn’t allow her parents, Christos and Lesli Catsouras, to identify their daughter’s body. But because of two California Highway Patrol officers, a digital camera and e-mail users’ easy access to the “Forward” button, there are now nine photos of the accident scene, taken just moments after Nikki’s death, circulating virally on the Web. In one, her nearly decapitated head is drooping out the shattered window of her father’s Porsche.

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The Catsourases are by no means the first to suffer at the hands of cyber-aggressors. But their story is unique in that it touches on so many of the ways the Web has become perverted: as an outlet for morbid curiosities, a space where cruel behavior suffers little consequence and an uncontrollable forum in which things that were once private—like photos of the dead—can go public in an instant. The case also illustrates how the law has struggled to define how legal concepts like privacy and defamation are translated into an online world.

ReputationDefender CEO Michael Fertik is quoted in the piece and the lack of legal precedent in the online arena is also discussed.

While the specifics of the Catsouras case are unique, the broader issue—of how current laws seem impotent when faced with the viral spread of malicious Internet content—is becoming a widespread concern. Until it was shuttered last year, a site called Juicy Campus stirred controversy by spreading rumors about college students’ alleged sexual escapades. Sites like DontDateHimGirl leak dirty allegations about unsuspecting men. And two Yale Law School alumnae have spent years going after the perpetrators of nasty gossip about them, posted on a legal-discussion board.

But while libel and slander are regulated by law in the real world, in the cyberworld almost anything goes. In 1996, Congress passed legislation—Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—that immunizes Web sites from liability for the speech of individuals, under the rationale that companies like AOL shouldn’t be responsible for the actions of each user. As a consequence, victims of a damaged reputation have little legal recourse. A person could try to sue the individuals who post on a Web site—as the Yale women have done—but in the world of anonymous postings and shared public computers, just finding a person’s real name can be next to impossible. Even if you do identify them, and they agree to remove the content, it’s unlikely the content is contained to that Web site alone. “We have created a deck that is so stacked against private individuals who want to protect their name and privacy that you don’t even have a fighting chance,” says Fertik of Reputation Defender.