Following some coverage in TechCrunch, Unvarnished has been getting some attention from commentators and journalists. I’ve been getting calls and emails about it all week.

If it gets enough traction, Unvarnished could end up being a powerful reputation tool. We’ll see if it gets there! We see person reputation and professional reputation websites appear about once a month. Some are domain specific (lawyer reviews, teacher reviews, etc.), and some are more generic.

This spate of coverage brings to mind the frenzy of national press a year ago about a website called “PersonRatings.com”. According to Wikipedia, that site is now just dead:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PersonRatings.com

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we have predicted that 2010 will be the year in which FICO-type credit scoring starts to whither on the vine as being outdated and data poor, to be supplanted with much more subtle and data-rich scoring regimes that will affect your reputation, privacy, credit, etc.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…..

Over the past few days, our phones have been ringing off the hook. As we’ve reported here and here, emails appear to be circulating virally across the law enforcement communities of the United States about Spokeo as a “new powerful public info database.” Links on the Spokeo site have prompted a number of officers to reach out to ReputationDefender to see how they can remove their families’ personal information from this and other databases.

A couple of the officers have kindly forwarded at least one of the emails that seems to be circulating. Below is a very lightly edited version of what we received:

Subject: FW: Officer Awareness – New Powerful Public Info Database Online

New Powerful Public Info Database Online

Please take a moment to check that your info is NOT on this public website. If you are on this website– it may list your address, home phone number and even a google map pic of your home. See the email below for instructions on how to remove your name. The web site is www.spokeo.com.

Go to the site and enter your name. If your information is on there and you want it removed, go to the bottom of the home page and click on privacy. Follow the instructions to remove your information. It takes about 24 hours.

Some of the officers calling us have been understandably alarmed at how much very detailed information can be found on websites that aggregate data. We’ve commented many times both in this space and in other media that there has been a hockeysticking proliferation of both search technology and aggregation-and-correlation technology. This sea change has had some remarkable consequences. Today, researchers can interpolate everything from one’s sexual preference from anonymous video rental data and even social security numbers from other incidental data points.

A number of callers have asked us “how do I remove my name and information from Spokeo and other similar databases?” Years ago, we identified the growing problem of the rising availability of both publicly available information and aggregated-and-correlated information. The power of digital search, when put together with instantaneously available electronic databases, allows third parties to compile remarkably detailed profiles of people based on data points as typical as home addresses and names and as perhaps “unlikely” as email addresses, social media usernames, and even the names of other people in your social networks.

Back in 2006, when we were founded, ReputationDefender set out as one of its core missions the objective of putting your privacy back in your hands. Our MyPrivacy product is the only service in the world that connects directly with some of the key information aggregating and correlating databases so that you can both FIND yourself and REMOVE yourself. The product gets more powerful all the time, as we connect to more and more databases across the Internet. MyPrivacy costs $9.95/month (or significantly less if you purchase a longer subscription upfront) and finds your data, removes your data, and then ensures that your data don’t get BACK into the databases, many of which constantly crawl and regularly repopulate with your information.

MyPrivacy removes you not only from Spokeo but also from many other databases across the Internet.

ReputationDefender has been proud to offer our MyPrivacy service FREE TO LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS for a long time. Below is a link to a free registration process for law enforcement:

http://www.reputationdefender.com/?code=officers2009

So how do you delete Spokeo results? What’s the fastest way to erase a Spokeo entry for you, along with many other similar results all across on the web? Join MyPrivacy today! Get your family’s privacy back in your family’s hands now.

Terrific satire from The Onion. http://tinyurl.com/yja55lx

This article in the New York Times by David Barboza reminds us, once again, that the rise of Chinese expert hacking is real and a threat not only to Chinese citizens and government agencies but to the United States, our allies, our citizens, and our companies