Entries from March 2010 ↓

In today’s Quick Hits we discuss cyberbullying, the role of anonymity on the web, and why spending too much time tending your digital farm could cost you your job.

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Should School Officials Be Punished Over Cyberbullying Suicide?

In an ongoing investigation into the suicide of Massachusetts teen Phoebe Prince, parents are wondering why nine students have been charged with crimes, while no school officials have been indicted. Currently, laws specifically governing cyberbullying are in their infancy. As more cases like this occur, we will begin to see a precedent established for who can and cannot be held responsible. Until then, prosecutors will be even more reliant on their professional judgment when seeking justice for a cyberbullying victim, and, in this case, it would appear that there is not a strong case against the school officials.

Does Chatroulette Prove That People Want Anonymity Online?

In an article at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech Blog, Jessi Hempel wonders whether the socialization of the web has hurt our ability to communicate freely, and cites the popularity of anonymous video chat website Chatroulette as a sign that people still wish to embrace anonymity online.

From the blog post, “We aren’t just constructing Facebook profiles anymore. We are building our personal brands, layering on photographs and compiling status updates that represent not the life we experience, but rather the life we want our audiences to believe we experience. And as more and more web services are launched and stitched together, allowing us to capture every image and identify our every location, we must complete an increasingly complex calculus to maintain these personal brands. It’s no surprise that a backlash is emerging.”

A Call to Ban Anonymous Comments

In somewhat of a counterpoint to Jessi Hempel’s article at Fortune, Connie Schultz at the Cleveland Plain Dealer discusses how she “look[s] forward to the day when news organizations start to ban anonymous comments on their Web sites” and why she believes that intellectual discourse must begin with a name and an identity if it is to be taken seriously.

Which side do you tend to agree with?

Facebook Glitch Exposes Private E-Mail Addresses

For about 30 minutes last night, a number of Facebook users had their private e-mail addresses shared publicly through a glitch in the system. PC World speculates that the glitch may have come as a result of Facebook’s recently announced privacy changes, wherein the site will make it easier to send your basic info to preapproved third-party websites. Securing users’ private info is typically one of Facebook’s strong suits, but when you’re dealing with 400 million users worldwide, there are bound to be slip-ups.

Bulgarian Official Fired for FarmVille

We’ve discussed how inappropriate pictures on Facebook can get you fired, but now we know that playing too much FarmVille can get you canned as well. According to this report from Mashable, a Bulgarian public official was fired after he was observed spending too much time on the game during meetings. Interestingly, he wasn’t the only one playing FarmVille either. As the report explains, “the councilman – Dimitar Kerin – defended his game play by pointing to the fact his colleagues were also playing, so much so that they had reached a higher level him.” Bummer for Mr. Kerin. If he was going to lose his job, he could have at least gone out on top.

Over the weekend, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington predicted that, someday soon, reputation online would be a dead issue. In essence, Arrington argued that the Internet will soon become so full of review websites and other forums for anonymous speech that it would become unnecessary for people to work on managing their reputations because society as a whole will be forced to learn how to distinguish the fake from the real.

It was a bold prediction, and one that prompted intense discussion at TechCrunch (as well as a nuanced response from ReputationDefender CEO Michael Fertik here on our blog), but what was it that prompted Arrington to make his prediction in the first place? A new start-up profiled at TechCrunch today, called Unvarnished.

Unvarnished is described in the TechCrunch article as “Yelp for LinkedIn.” In other words, like Yelp, users can leave anonymous reviews, with the difference being that instead of reviewing businesses, these reviews are meant to establish a person’s professional credibility (like LinkedIn). The notion that Unvarnished is for “professionals” is carried through in the website’s messaging. For instance, on Unvarnished’s beta homepage, users are greeted with the message, “Unvarnished is an online resource for building, managing, and researching professional reputation.”

Interestingly, however, while Unvarnished purports to be a tool for building a professional reputation, the website seems to offer a very convenient method by which users can anonymously inflict intentional damage on one another with little regard for factual accuracy. In a comment on TechCrunch’s most recent post, Unvarnished co-founder Pete Kazanjy addressed some of the concerns about his company, saying,

“We need to be clear about what we mean when we say “anonymous” here, in that this can be sensitive topic. To encourage candor, and allow review authors to contribute honest, balanced reviews without fear of repurcussion, Unvarnished obscures the identity of reviewer authors–a review author’s identity will never be outwardly tied to a review they have been submitted. Furthermore, Unvarnished does not outwardly tie together multiple reviews submitted by the same user, in order to prevent the reverse-engineering of an author’s identity.

However, reviewers are not anonymous to the Unvarnished backend systems–all reviews submitted by a given user are tied together in our systems such that better reviewers can be rewarded for their strong reviews, and reviewers who participate in bad behavior can be censured across all of their reviews.

Ultimately, reviewers do have identity on the site, and reputation and authority associated with that identity. Unvarnished wants reviewers to invest in that identity and associated authority, by rewarding strong reviewers by making all their reviews more authoritative, and by punishing badly behaved reviewers by demoting or, in egregious cases, removing their reviews–including their reviews that were submitted in good faith. If a reviewer is found to have violated Unvarnished Community Guidelines or Terms of Service, repurcussions will extend across all reviews authored by that user.”

In a way, Unvarnished isn’t anything new. A number of companies have come up in recent years offering users the opportunity to leave anonymous reviews about people. One example focused on the venture capital industry is TheFunded.com, though there have been other more generally focused websites as well. While Unvarnished differentiates itself somewhat through its professional focus, given the number of people review websites that have come before it, there is no guarantee that the company will take off.

Truthfully, however, whether Unvarnished becomes a major force in the world of social media isn’t important. The thing that individuals must consider is how they will combat negative reviews if they should come up. As Michael Fertik discussed in an interview with ABC News last year, “Normally, no good comes from these [people review] sites. They become places of abuse.” Even if Unvarnished takes major steps to prevent fraud, and we commend Mr. Kazenjy for some of the things that he and his team have already put in place, the truth is that at least some people’s reputations will be unfairly damaged.

When that happens, the individuals who have invested time in monitoring and proactively building a strong online presence will be the ones who can weather the storm. To this end, we encourage anyone who is interesting in protecting their good name online to give us a call today at 877-720-6488 and talk with a representative about our unique suite of reputation management and Internet privacy products.

Obscene Pictures of NBA Player Dorell Wright Hit the Web

Professional basketball player Dorell Wright of the Miami Heat is the latest NBA player to get caught with his pants down, so to speak, thanks to the unflinching reality of the Internet. Wright, who had sent some explicit images of himself in a video chat a year ago, saw those images come back to haunt him recently when they reappeared on blogs and on Twitter. Wright apologized for the incident and made no mention of plans to pursue any legal action against the individual who shared the images.

Wright isn’t the first NBA player to face embarrassment over risque photos online. In February, Portland Trail Blazers star Greg Oden and San Antonio Spurs player George Hill faced similar episodes.

Facebook Helps Australian Admins Fight Tribute Page Abuse

Facebook has taken a small step toward ending rampant abuse and bullying on Facebook memorial pages in Australia. The objectionable content has appeared most notably on memorial pages for two youth murder victims. According to TG Daily, “Queensland premier Anna Bligh reportedly wrote to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg appealing for help in blocking such material,” and in response Facebook has contacted all page administrators in Australia explaining how to “restrict permissions, remove content from a page or ban individual fans.”

While I’m sure that this isn’t exactly the step that Bligh and others wanted from Facebook, it is something, and it is consistent with Facebook’s general strategy of remaining above the fray and encouraging users to sort out problems.

Lawmakers Want Google Buzz Investigation

According to the LA Times Technology Blog, “Lawmakers are urging the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to investigate complaints that Google’s Buzz social networking service breached consumer privacy.” The pleas for investigation come approximately one and a half months after Google Buzz launched to significant fanfare, and even more significant criticism.

Help Your School District Take Action Against Cyberbullying

What steps has your children’s school district taken to prevent cyberbullying? This article from the Malden Observer discusses how the Malden, MA school district has been proactive in addressing cyberbullying concerns by drafting a new temporary policy on cyberbullying for the current school year with the intention of developing a permanent policy over the summer with community input. Malden, which is a suburb of Boston, decided to take up cyberbullying issues after the suicide of South Hadley, MA teen Phoebe Prince.

FBI Tracks Down Man Over YouTube Threats

Have you ever wondered how fast the FBI can turn a piece of information such as your YouTube profile into your home address? Well, it turns out that if you threaten to kill YouTube employees’ children and then threaten a Congressman, it doesn’t take that long at all. This article from Ars Technica details how one man’s threatening rants earned him a pair of handcuffs in just a few days time.

Early Show Examines Cyberbullying

The CBS Early Show examines the suicide of New York teenager Alexis Pilkington, and discusses the effects of cyberbullying with Krysten Moore, a 20-year-old former Miss Teen New Jersey and the founder of Love Our Children USA, “an organization committed to ending violence against children and helping parents protect their children from bullying.”

Facebook Planning New Privacy Policy Changes

Recently, Facebook announced the company would be making even more changes to its privacy policies. This article from Robert L. Mitchell at Computer World discusses the proposed changes and why they are further opening the doors for completely public profiles. The last time Facebook made changes, it caused an uproar, but resulted in few people actually leaving the website. Will that change this time around? I’m going to guess no.

Facebook Worm Disguises Itself as Anti-Virus Software

Security researchers at F-Secure have learned about a new worm on Facebook that disguises itself as an anti-virus application to trick users into downloading it. If installed, the application will randomly spam your friends by tagging them in a photo. When they go to the photo to see what’s up, there is a link which prompts them to download the application themselves, thus restarting the cycle. To avoid this phony application, don’t install any application that claims to be anti-virus for Facebook.

College Students Focus on Cleaning Up Their Facebook Profiles

According to this article in CNN, college students are finally beginning to understand what we’ve been saying for four years now: if you have inappropriate content on Facebook, it could hurt your chances of finding a job after graduation. Offering numerous examples, the CNN article explores the steps that some college students are taking in order to improve their online reputations, including such drastic tactics as using a different version of their name to apply for jobs. We would recommend trying MyEdge instead.

Web Directories Offer E-Reputation Solutions

This article from the Montreal Gazette discusses the emerging business of online reputation management, and how companies that primarily function as web directories, i.e. Yellow Pages, have begun offering “e-reputation” solutions to customers who want to be seen in a positive light online.

Michael Arrington posted an interesting piece yesterday on reputation. I encourage you to read the piece in full, but, in short and in part, he thinks and/or predicts that the world will and should end up being more forgiving of isolated embarrassing incidents, photos, and comments that find their way onto the Internet. He thinks that the hockeysticking publication of all kinds of content will end up conditioning us to the impact of individual bits of content that might trouble us today.

At least as applied to the way in which he views the facts on the ground, I’m not sure he’s wrong. In the future, an isolated photo or anonymous comment may not spell the end of your life. It may be surprising to some that I say that, given my day job. But he could be right.

More broadly, I don’t think that Arrington’s post, while thoughtful and considered, gets the basic lay of the land right. I think that his overall conclusion, that reputation is or will be a dead issue, is off the mark.

The concept of reputation–the ability to assess reputation both deeply and (in)accurately–is not a static target. Indeed, as some of the commentators on TechCrunch said in response to Arrington’s post, the arrival of semantic web, audio search, and video search, when combined with increasingly sophisticated and far-reaching aggregation, analysis, and correlation technologies, will actually make it easier and easier to paint a surprisingly detailed and comprehensive picture of an individual. That will also mean that it will get easier and easier to generate reputational scores that replace and dominate other prevailing scores like FICO.

Elsewhere we have predicted that 2010 will be the year in which FICO-type credit scoring starts to whither on the vine as being outdated and data poor, to be supplanted with much more subtle and data-rich scoring regimes that will affect your reputation, privacy, credit, etc. We’ve started to see the emergence of some early indications around the parking lot that this is happening with increasing speed, including Twitter-related scoring from Klout, discussion that credit companies are now checking out who your “friends” are on social networks to decide if you’re a good fit for credit, and articles about insurance companies that are going to use data about whether you’re out of the house or on vacation to make actuarial findings on which to assess your premiums.

ReputationDefender has been playing with some Alpha/Beta scoring mechanisms of our own, to show how much visibility and control a given person has over his or her Internet-wide results, as well as how he or she might be perceived on the web as compared to other similarly situated persons. (Our customers are already getting some of these results so they can get their own private assessments, and we should be launching more in this area in the coming months.)

I’ve predicted publicly that medical insurance companies will try as hard as they can to aggregate data points from social media to set premiums for your coverage; we can imagine that insurance company executives would be willing to pay top dollar to know that a 35 year old healthy woman shares a last name with a 65 year-old woman in her social network who is a member of a breast cancer survivors group on that social network, that the 35 year-old healthy woman has pointed her browser a few times over the past year to a cancer treatment website, and that she emails with someone else about the topic of breast cancer. For better or worse, the future is going to see huge incentives to aggregate and correlate increasingly intimate details of a person’s past and current lives, whether they are “reputation” oriented, “privacy” oriented, or both.

Indeed, as we see every day in our business, the distinction between the topics of “reputation” and “privacy” is eroding swiftly. Most data points available about a person’s life heavily implicate both reputation and privacy. Consider a person’s income, zip code, employment history, university grades, personal and family health history, DNA information, photo history, and even the identity of his or her friends, and how each of those pieces of information impacts our assessments of his or her reputation. Consider both how “private” that person might consider each of those data points, and how much he or she might feel that the publication and discovery of such information might affect his or her social, romantic, or professional reputation.

SNAP JUDGMENTS (EVEN FASTER THAN GLADWELL’S BLINK)

As personal data proliferate around the web (whether we publish the data points ourselves or someone else publishes them for us or about us), it will get harder and harder for third parties to make snap judgments based on Google results alone. One way to read Arrington’s post is consistent with this prediction: the impact of a single photo or comment in someone’s Google results will have less impact in the future than it does now. One reason for this change is that even Google, in its current basic setup of a List of Ten Search Results Per Page, may not be able to present a sufficiently detailed or nuanced view of a person to be relied on as fully as it does now. In other words, as Arrington suggests, the stray item that doesn’t portray you beautifully may have less impact in a few years than it does today.

But the world of search-and-conclusion will not look the same in a few years, or perhaps even this year. It’s already clear that third parties, whether they are considering you for employment or for a date, are looking ever more deeply on the Internet for content about you. As recently as the good old days of 2009, a simple Google search might have sufficed, perhaps when taken together with a quick read of Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace to see what information might lie in the most visible parts of the social web.

Not anymore. A remarkably comprehensive report published a couple months ago on Data Privacy Day revealed that employment recruiters are looking all over the web for information about candidates. One remarkable data point from this study showed that 32% of recruiters are searching VIRTUAL WORLDS to decide if a candidate is a good fit for employment. Imagine how how both deep and dorky that kind of searching is!

[via Microsoft Data Privacy Day 2009 Report]

In the end, it is becoming increasingly important, not decreasingly, for employers and other third parties to develop detailed pictures of the people they are considering hiring, dating, partnering, etc. Moreover, as more and more data points become available, more and more people are feeling spurred to dig ever deeper to get them. The incentive is increasingly powerful to gather and analyze the information that is increasingly available.

So what’s next?

As data proliferate, it will get harder and more time-consuming to develop these comprehensive pictures manually. What we’re seeing happen already will happen more swiftly: more companies will appear that seek to aggregate the data points that are discretely and variously available (i.e. from the open web, from the social web, from closed databases, from virtual worlds, etc.) into comprehensive portraits. And if we can predict anything, Simpler Will Prevail. People will be “reduced” to numbers.

In this context, “Simpler Will Prevail” means that more detailed and nuanced Personal Scoring will appear and will dominate the existing scoring offerings like FICO. Everyone likes a nice tidy number that concretely summarizes the value of something (credit-worthiness, a stock price, a zip code, how many followers you have on Twitter, how many unique users you have on your website), and personal scoring will be just as prevalent, widespread, and, in many cases, life-affecting. When these scores appear and become more data-rich and stable, third parties will start to rely on both context-specific scores (e.g. eBay buyer/seller scores) and universally applicable scores (“honesty” scores, “business reputation” scores, “good date material” scores) for snap judgments that would make even Malcolm Gladwell lose his hair.

In other words, the future will see ever more reliance on concise, summary-level reputation assessments. It may be true, as Arrington suggests, that a particular photo or anonymous comment will have less impact than it does today. But that outcome, if it obtains, will be a function of the fact that each of those data points will simply be included and imputed in a broader and hugely impactful score or snap conclusion–based on digitally aggregated and correlated information–about a person’s reputation. In a way, Arrington’s own view that a “Yelp for individuals” may or will appear tends toward the same conclusion. Some attempts at person-review pages have already appeared. In the end, though, it is likely that data points will be collected from many of those pages (i.e. not just one) and then mashed up with social web results, open web results, Google results, private database results, and others to form comprehensive images of individuals.

As you consider whether you think this point of view is right with respect to reputation, consider whether you think it’s true with respect to “privacy.” When I have occasion to talk publicly about the possible erosion of privacy through data aggregation and correlation, much of the audience usually nod their heads in easy agreement; sometimes, though, when I offer the same analysis with respect to reputation, it’s not as immediately obvious to the same thoughtful individuals that the narrative of reputation is very similar to the story of privacy. But, from our vantage point at ReputationDefender, based on our work every day in the marketplace and our daily discussion with customers and, not only is the distinction between reputation and privacy eroding, but what is true for privacy is probably even more true for reputation.

In the immediate- and medium-term future, more and more structured and unstructured data will be

1) found about you, whether from the open web or Deep Web,

2) disambiguated as being about you vs. someone else with a same or similar name,

3) correlated and connected with other data,

4) assessed and analyzed in connection with the other data, and then

5) compiled into specifically and universally applicable scores that third parties will use to make conclusive and instantaneous judgments.

That is our prediction. And it is also one of the fundamental reasons I started ReputationDefender: I don’t think that it is necessarily or always just and correct that, simply because more search and aggregation technologies are becoming available, you as an individual must therefore and ineluctably surrender any iota of control over shaping your future, protecting your private life, or establishing and building your reputation. The tools for delivering both inadvertent and intentional reputational damage to third parties are proliferating fast. The tools for aggregating the various disparate data points into comprehensive portraits are likewise exploding in number and sophistication. I believe that individuals deserve to have tools to protect themselves and fight back.

AND WHAT ABOUT THOSE INDIVIDUAL DATA POINTS AFTER ALL

Couple more thoughts on Arrington’s post. An important theme it misses is that one nasty person (troll, vigilante, whatever we call it) can and always will be able to poison a reputation online. It’s not true that our only problems on the web are caused by youthful indiscretions. Much more than half of the damage we see happen to people is caused by third parties. And a material portion of that is caused by bizarre enemies who go to great lengths to destroy their real or imagined antagonists. One dedicated and even mildly savvy person can, for example, post anonymously under 100 different names and drown out all the true positive feedback.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, the “truth” that can be found on the Internet is all too often really false, half-true, obsolete, or terribly incomplete. It is true that a more accurate picture of a specific person or topic will emerge if it receives a) a large volume of discussion over b) an extended period of time. But most topics that are discussed in any significant volume don’t get that. Most topics and people in the world that do get discussed in volume get either a huge amount of attention briefly (think of the Youtube video of Miss Teen South Carolina flubbing her answers) or a small amount of attention by a tiny but dedicated group of commentators over an extended period of time (i.e. an ex-lover who sets out to ruin your life). Most people in those situations therefore have very lopsided portraits. In those cases, the “isolated” problem that plagues a person isn’t isolated at all.

As a final note on Arrington’s prediction, I had an interesting meeting recently that may color our thinking on the question whether people will eventually become desensitized to the damaging content that appears on the Internet with increasing speed and frequency. On a recent trip to LA, I had occasion to visit the extremely gorgeous offices of a well-known Hollywood agency. One of the veterans of the agency told me that it never ceases to amaze him that celebrities with whom he works will readily believe tabloid material about other celebrities even though they themselves also know that the web and print gossip is rarely, if ever, true about themselves. He said he routinely gets on the phone with an irate client who expresses disgust and frustration that a nonexistent romantic relationship is being reported widely on page 1 of one trade rag or another, and then in the same phone call he or she will say “hey, did you see this other story about Ms. X? I had no idea she was dating Mr. So and So”.

It was a surprising and illuminating story for me. I wonder if that means we’ll actually become more inured to those weird reputation-affecting data points after all…..