Entries from September 2009 ↓

When President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle posed for a picture with Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, his wife, and their two daughters on Friday, they sparked questions about whether world leaders and their families have the ability to control their online privacy in the digital age.

Spanish law prohibits the media from publishing photos of the Prime Minister’s two daughters. But the media quickly published the photo taken during the reception at the New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. This ignited an online frenzy of derogatory comments about the teenage girls’ appearance. At the request of the Spanish government, the picture was removed from the popular photo-sharing site Flickr, but the picture had already spread across the Internet on various unmonitored blogs and picture sites.

Print and online media have respected the privacy of various political officials and their families over the years. But the unwanted dissemination of private photos on the Internet has become an increasingly important issue for high-ranking political officials and their families as well as for the average person.

Are you concerned about your or your child’s online privacy? Let us know your thoughts and consider signing up for one of ReputationDefender’s several online reputation management solutions.

According to a survey due to be released this Wednesday, two-thirds of Americans object to advertisers tracking their activities online.  The survey was a joint effort between Professors from University of California, Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania.  They also found that when individuals were informed about the specific methods advertisers use to gather information in order to target ads, the percent of Americans in opposition to such tactics rose to as high as 86%. Download the survey here.

The survey reached 1,000 adult Internet users in America, and questions focused on whether consumers want new laws to protect the way that advertisers track personal “Web-histories.”  The majority of users desire more strict punishment of those advertisers that violate their personal privacy, and most believe that it should be illegal for advertisers to store their personal data at all.

If you’re concerned about how being tracked online, you can make sure to “clear cookies” in your web browser on a regular basis or you can use some of the largest advertising networks’  opt-out forms to do so permanently: Google, 24/7 Real Media, Doubleclick, Nielsen, ValueClick

We also suggest checking out the World Privacy Forum’s list of opt-out links, but be sure to consider whether you’d like to continue to receive targeted advertising first: Do you want to make sure advertisers show you the cheapest tickets for your upcoming trip to Hawaii? Or make sure you get ads that show you the latest and greatest gear for your sport-of-choice? Then you might want to leave the cookies alone.

For those of you who would like to dig deeper, check out this August article from Wired on how the next generation of Flash Cookies is making it more difficult for individuals to find out what advertisers are tracking them online.

Additionally, if you want to track and remove your personally identifiable information from the largest people-databases out there, we recommend signing up for The Global Do Not Call List today. We’ll help protect you against online and offline stalking, exposure of your personal data, nosy individuals and fraudsters.

There has been another sighting of  ReputationDefender “I googled you ” shirts, this time at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles:

Another ReputationDefender “I googled you” t-shirt, this time in LA.

In other news, I’m happy to be joining the ReputationDefender team as General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer.  I look forward to the opportunity to help everyday people take control of their online image, take back their privacy, and protect their reputations.  And, of course, the company is filled with amazing people with whom I am lucky to work.

I look forward to posting occasional news updates to this blog, as well as some commentary about online privacy and legal issues.  Stay tuned!

– Dave Thompson

The courts have often had a hard time keeping up with the fast pace of ever-changing technology. The combination of mobile devices and social networking has created a new version of an old challenge. How do we make sure that jurors are deciding cases based on the evidence presented, and not based on their own research, when so many people are used to getting easy answers via a quick Google search?

Lawyer Harvey Levine thinks he has a solution:

“Jurors will have to sign declarations attesting that they will not use ‘personal electronic and media devices’ to research or communicate about any aspect of the case. That includes computers, cell phones and laptops. Jurors will have to sign the declarations, made under penalty of perjury, both before and after they serve.”

Levine is trying a wrongful death case against Entercom Communications. He wants to prevent jurors from making decisions based on the thousands of results for a Google search on phrases like “Jennifer Strange water intoxication.”

I thought this was already covered, that everyone knew that if you’re serving on a jury, you’re not supposed to do your own research, but rather confine your analysis of the case to the evidence and testimony presented in court. Judges already tell jurors what constitutes acceptable behavior via traditional jury instructions. However, it appears that some people aren’t getting it. Consider these recent cases of jury misconduct:

• 9 jurors in a federal drug case admit to doing their own research on the web, leaving the judge, William J. Zloch, no choice but to declare a mistrial.
• Jurors tweet updates like “I just gave away TWELVE MILLION DOLLARS of somebody else’s money” and “Stay tuned for a big announcement” from their mobile phones during trial.
• In England, a juror is dismissed after posting details of a child abduction and sexual assault case, and then holding a poll to help her decide whether the defendants were guilty or innocent.

It’s all right to bring your life experiences and knowledge into the courtroom, but it’s not acceptable to go outside the jury box and make your decision using information not presented during the trial. What do you think? Should judges have to stay informed about the latest social network technologies in order to specifically disallow them in jury instructions? Or do traditional warnings like “don’t talk to anyone about the trial until it’s over” cover it?

As Bob Dylan once sang, the Times They Are a-Changin’. According to a study done by Forrester Research, nearly half of all adults in the United States with Internet access (42%) are active on one or more social networking websites. Two years ago, this number was only 20%. Much of this increase can be attributed to the sky-rocketing growth of Facebook, which now boasts 250 million users worldwide.

Of course, with the growth of Facebook and other social networking sites, there is also a need for social media users to be responsible for how they represent themselves online. Increasingly, hiring managers and recruiters have been turning to social networks to identify potential job candidates. In a different study conducted by CareerBuilder, 45% of employers reported that they use social networking sites to screen potential employees. This number is up from 22% the previous year, indicating the fast growing importance of pro-active Online Reputation Management.

Some other interesting tidbits from the CareerBuilder study:

• 11% of employers plan to start using social networking sites for employment screening.
• Of the 45% of employers who conduct online searches of job candidates, 29% use Facebook, 26% use LinkedIn, 21% use MySpace, 11% search blogs, and 7% use Twitter.
• 18% of employers said they found content on social networking sites that encouraged them to hire the candidate, while 35% of employers found content that caused them not to hire the candidate.