ReputationDefender recently ran across this clever video that points out the real world consequences of social networking for teens and students. It was put together by a great nonprofit called ConnectSafely.org and is very well done.

ReputationDefender encourages parents to educate their children about online safety and their online reputation. Any readers have online teen safety tips? Let us know in the comments!

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The dean of an Indianapolis, Indiana high school, Roncalli High, and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese, have subpoenaed Palo Alto based social network giant Facebook for information regarding the identity of a person who setup a false profile on the site.

Someone posing as the dean for the interparochial archdiocesan Catholic high school (the term interparochial referring to the fact that the school receives financial and pastoral support from the parishes that comprise the South Deanery of the Indianapolis Archdiocese), began contacting Roncalli students with inappropriate messages, according to an attorney for the Archdiocese of Indianapolis.

Although Facebook removed the fake profile from its site after Roncalli officials contacted them about it last month, the lawsuit — which alleges harassment and identity deception against the anonymous troublemaker — was filed Thursday because Facebook’s privacy policy requires a court order or subpoena before it will release any identifying information about a user.

According to the Indianapolis Star, the Archdiocese doesn’t know whether a Roncalli student created the “fauxfile.” Although Facebook has declined to issue a statement on the matter, the information that they release could be as vague as an IP address.

The above article quotes several lawyers with differing views on digital speech. Some say that students posing as school officials online are defaming their administrators and can be held liable while others see the fake profile as parody speech protected by the First Amendment.

This is another example of where the law is behind current technology and only future rulings will decide what is a harmless prank and what is a crime online.

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Mason High School students in Cincinatti, Ohio are dealing with the fallout from pictures of an assistant basketball coach engaged in what appears to be a round of beer pong during a party at his home. This would not be bad in and of itself, but the pictures suggest that there were people under 21 in attendance, and Mason Police are now investigating just what went on and who was there, according to the Enquirer (no, not the supermarket rag).

A private group of citizens calling themselves Citizens for Accountability and Results in Education (CARE), with a long history of criticizing the way the Mason school district has conducted business, presented the potentially incriminating photos to school officials this week. They claimed to have obtained them from an unnamed social networking site of one of the party participants. The photos were eventually turned over to the police.

We’ve covered stories like this before. They are nothing new with the inter-connectedness of the web growing by leaps and bounds seemingly every day. But what stuck out from the article for us was this quote from the coach’s attorney, Patrick Dunphy, to the Examiner:

“Any accusations that my clients participated in or hosted a party for Mason High School students where alcohol was served are absolutely untrue. […] “The accusation that my clients held a party in their home where alcohol was consumed by minors with their prior knowledge are absolutely false,” […] “Mrs. Crotty was out of state on the date apparently in question. […] I caution you that my clients are not public figures and that they will undoubtedly incur damage to their reputation in the community by the reckless reporting of unsubstantiated accusations.”

The attention paid to the reputations of his clients is certainly admirable and justified. Regardless of the outcome of the investigation, internet has once again proved to be a powerful reputation engine that can bring about consequences in the real world.

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Last year, ReputationDefender’s founder and CEO Michael Fertik was profiled in the Praized Blog. The article highlights ReputationDefender coverage in the Washington Post and the emergence of the Online Reputation Management industry.

Both the blog post and MSM story show Michael Fertik and ReputationDefender as advocates for individuals facing Internet Defamation and Internet Harassment. The Praized blog sums up by saying:

Wow! this is going to be big business in a few years. I would suggest that everyone working in search engine optimization today starts thinking about how this could positively impact their business.

One year out from this post, a lot has changed at ReputationDefender- for the better! We are growing steadily and are still the market leader for Online Identity Management. We recently launched our new MyEdge product that helps professionals like doctors, lawyers, teachers and business people control their online presence. Whether you are looking to network, evangelize or gain visibility online, your personal brand deserves the best service available. Sign up for ReputationDefender’s MyEdge today for as little as $99 and control what people find when they search for you.

We’ll follow up in another year and keep you up to date with all the exciting news from ReputationDefender.

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Quoting from Breitbart.com:

This weekend Amnesty International called on authorities in Egypt to free 16 Internet activists jailed for over two weeks under the charge of “threatening national security.”

Amnesty International believes all 16 to be prisoners of conscience, detained for their participation” in a “peaceful protest in the city of Alexandria on 23 July,” the London-based rights group said in a statement.

Of specific concern to the group are the fates of two activists, Ahmed Afifi and Mohammed Taher. Of them, Amnesty has said: “It is not known where they are held and Amnesty International fears they are at risk of torture or other ill-treatment.”

The detentions arose from the individuals’ involvement in the ‘6 April Youth’ Facebook group. Amnesty International believes them to be prisoners of conscience detained merely for exercising their right to freedom of peaceful assembly and expression. The ‘6 April’ group on Facebook has more than 72,000 members, and earlier this year it called for a day of protest at rising prices.

The arrests took place on Wednesday, after a group of about 30 young people gathered on a beach in Alexandria for a peaceful protest. This wouldn’t be a problem except that public protests are illegal under the state of emergency in force in Egypt for the last 27 years. Amnesty reports that on Thursday the detainees were ordered to be held for 15 days pending further investigation.

“Bloggers continue to face threats and harassment for their work as rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly continue to be restricted in Egypt,” the organization said.

The Facebook group was established in March by 27-year-old Esra Abdel Fattah, calling for the protests against price hikes. She was detained, but later freed after her mother made an appeal to Interior Minister Habib al-Adli.

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The question is as old as humanity, and has been heretofore covered by countless philosophers, theologians and jilted lovers. A new company, CriminalSearches.com, is helping you answer the question and verify your distrust of humanity all in a few key stokes!

Attached to PeopleFinders.com, the new site allows you to access the records of counties, municipalities, cities and states to provide an instant snapshot of people with criminal records. Private eyes have been doing this type of search for a fee since the Pinkerton Agency was busting up unionizing miners, but CiminalSeaches.com is giving up the goods for free. Ah, technology and the 21st century!

All derisiveness aside, the site does offer some very valuable tools. Parents may find the Sex Offender section of the site particularly useful, especially since it includes photos and details of offenses.

Of course, it’s not all peaches and cream when you get a database like this up and running. Firstly, there’s the matter of privacy. As much as someone violates the social contract when the commit a crime, aren’t they still afforded some degree of privacy? The real trouble comes when you get “false positives” that could lead to disastrous outcomes. It almost seems that bureaucracies were meant to breed mistakes, and when it comes to something like a charge of child molestation, say, you don’t want to be lumped into the wrong crowd. Especially if you’re moving to a new neighborhood and you happen to share the name of somebody who has committed said offense.

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If you’re a user of Facebook, you’ve probably noticed the recent changes to the layout that the social networking site has implemented.

MSNBC picked up the story, explaining that the redesign was intended to weed out spam on the site.

Facebook’s redesign aims to make user profiles more dynamic by giving more prominence to the newest information, and it is cracking down on applications that violate privacy or user-control guidelines.

“Users should have control of their information when and where they want,” said Ben Ling, the head of Facebook’s platform product management. “Users should share things because they want to share them.”

When Facebook gained popularity by becoming an open platform for independent designers to distribute their own Web programs 14 months ago, software makers used viral marketing tricks to flood member pages with confusing messages seemingly from friends.

In response, Facebook has launched the new design to trim down on the non-important social activities. Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst with Forrester Research explained it as such: “The redesign makes your profile more relevant to other users, telling them who is doing what, where are they and what are they doing socially.”

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Regular readers of the ReputationDefender blog are well versed in the real world effects of electronic gossip and internet harassment. The ReputationDefender blog posted about the Chicago ad executive who took his own life after an anonymous poster trashed his reputation online earlier this year. Today, the New York Times is reporting another case of Internet Revenge, with damaging real world consequences. Quoting from the page:

An angry husband’s Web-based vendetta against Steven Rattner, the head of Credit Suisse’s private equity arm, ultimately led to the executive’s resignation last week, Andrew Ross Sorkin writes in his latest DealBook column.

The tale and the Internet campaign — the talk of Wall Street for weeks — provide a lesson in the fragility of reputations on Wall Street, especially in the Internet age.

The backstory for this tale involves Mr. Rattner engaging in an affair with a married woman five years ago.

Kelly Cosgrove, the woman with whom Mr. Rattner had an affair, was married at the time to an Australian named Tommii Cosgrove. And after he learned of the affair, Mr. Cosgrove decided to make it his life’s mission to damage Mr. Rattner. And with Mr. Rattner’s resignation, he may have succeeded.

[SNIP]

On a half-dozen Web sites, and in a series of incendiary e-mail messages to Mr. Rattner’s colleagues and clients, as well as reporters, Mr. Cosgrove accused Mr. Rattner of trying, essentially, to steal his wife.

The Times leaves out the details of the internet whisper campaign, but Gawker has the enraged husband’s posts in its write up of the story:

 I warned you MR. RATNER, I would not let this rest. I am coming for you big time.

To be featured on FACEBOOK & MYSPACE very soon

[SNIP]

Mr. Ratner - the story doesn’t end until i say so. have a nice life. Everyone will know Steve Ratner pays for sex and stole my wife with $500,000.00 and a car.

Anonymous sources say that the damage caused to the Banker’s reputation led to his departure from Credit Suisse. Again, quoting from the Times:

Nonetheless, with DLJ Merchant Banking planning to raise a new investment fund, and the rumor mill still swirling about Mr. Rattner, and continually stirred up by Mr. Cosgrove, some of the firm’s partners were worried that Mr. Rattner was becoming a liability, said people at the firm who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Mr. Rattner apparently felt powerless to stop the attacks. He was described as a “man who said he was helpless against the destruction that can be wrought by aggressive campaigns on the Internet.”

When faced with an internet problem, many people may feel powerless. ReputationDefender can give you an Edge to defend your online reputation. With ReputationDefender you can put the power of personal PR to work for you and protect your good name today.

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ReputationDefender has blogged about the rise of Social Networks and the importance of Online Identity Management for professionals in the digital age before. From parents setting up Facebook profiles to job seekers looking to protect their reputation on the internet by grooming their Google results, the lives we lead online are remarkably visible.

But they are not always honest. According to Valleywag, an internet marketer is selling ten Facebook profiles on the internet auction site eBay. Each fake Facebook account is active and has over 200 friends. eBay has closed the auction but luckily, the ‘wag was able to snip some information from the listing before it disappeared, and it reads pretty interesting:

I am the owner of ten Facebook profiles. Every single one of my profiles has at minimum 200 friends. I have aggregated the friends for each persona organically. I will briefly mention the manner in which I compiled a list of genuine friends for each persona.

Step 1: Develop a persona with an intense interest on specific subjects/topics
Step 2: Integrate that individual into communities/forums based on their interests
Step 3: Stimulate conversation inside communities/forums and interact with other users
Step 4: Establish the persona inside the communities/forums
Step 5: Begin to add friends organically

The profiles have their own personalities and interests, and include Carrie, a 26 year old fashionista and Michael, a 42 year old intellectual with two kids. This post again raises concerns about the fluid nature of online identity, and people should be careful what information they share online.

In closing, one of the commenters may have said it best:  Someone has finally figured out how to monetize Facebook.

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Jared S. Fogel, best known as the spokesman for Subway sandwich shop “The Subway Guy” Born December 1st, 1977 – Died yesterday at 4:43pm EST.

So reads the first paragraph of Mr. Fogle’s fake online obituary on JaredRemembered.com. Just who is Jared Fogle? Jared Fogle is the popular spokesman for Subway sandwiches. You’ve seen him in many a commercial for the sandwich chain as the guy who was fat and then ate only Subway and got skinny. It’s a true story and a marketer’s dream come true.

Perhaps his popularity was to blame for the internet prank. False celebrity death notices are nothing new in the age of the internet. Just ask the Blues Clues guy, Steve Burns, whose reported death became an urban legend, online and off. This most recent hoax was apparently very believable, as it was picked up on several blogs.

In all likelihood, pranksters are behind the false remembrance page. But the web page, to the casual observer, lends the claim of authority. Who knows how many people will be misled by this sort of thing?

The whole episode shows just how susceptible to fraud your online reputation can be. Jared Fogle was targeted because of his celebrity, but everyone is at risk of digital identity theft and profile jacking. It is something we all need to be aware of when we are online. Controlling your personal reputation online is vital, and ReputationDefender reminds you that vigilance is required to protect your good name.

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According to the Fanhouse, ESPN Radio personalities Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic recently received a crash course in Online Reputation Management. The hosts of Mike and Mike in the Morning recently Googled themselved and were troubled by the results. Quoting from the page:

Greenberg said that one day, out of curiosity, he typed “Greenberg Golic ESPN” into Google, and was horrified by the results. Greenberg’s bottom-line conclusion: “People cannot stand us.”

Sure enough, the first Google result for that search query is a blog post headlined, “Weenie Greenie: ESPN Radio’s Mike Greenberg Gives Us All a Lesson in Arrogance.” The post mocks Greenberg and “his sub-normal-IQ sidekick Mike Golic.”

The lesson here is clear: Anyone can have their online reputation damaged by a poor Google handshake, even those with a well established reputation in the real world.

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For some time there have been rumors around Silicon Valley and beyond about the magic that is the Google campus. It has been spoken of like some sort of Geek Nirvana or Coding Valhalla where you feast nightly in the Google cafeteria on any meal your heart desires as you guzzle Mountain Dew and debate Ruby on Rails with the ghost of Einstein. Some of this talk has turned out to be true. For instance, Google allows their engineers to take time in “nap pods” for a quick break during the day. It is without any surprise that I can see how they got their good reputation.

Which brings us to an important but often overlooked concept of reputation management. With the relatively new phenomena of social networks and blogging, a company’s brand name can be elevated to otherworldly heights with just a few keystrokes and clicks. Wikipedia defines reputation management as:

the process of tracking an entity’s actions and other entities’ opinions about those actions; reporting on those actions and opinions; and reacting to that report creating a feedback loop. All entities involved are generally people, but that need not always be the case. Other examples of entities include animals, businesses, or even locations or materials. The tracking and reporting may range from word-of-mouth to statistical analysis of thousands of data points.

An important part of this process is understanding that social networks give consumers easy access to spreading news, and thus reputation management online is critical. A good place to start efforts in this vein is brand monitoring. You can track a company, brand, person, just about anything online.

Google itself has positioned itself in this space with its Google Alerts, automatic notifications that ping you when your search term is found online. ReputationDefender also offers personal brand monitoring with MyReputation. MyReputation from ReputationDefender goes beyond Google Alerts to search social networks, white papers, people search engines and the deep internet to return more information related to your person.

Monitoring a brand, whether corporate or personal, is a vital part of Online Reputation Management and, as the tale of the Googleplex shows, having a great online reputation reflects well on your brand and your business.

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The New York Times reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced some major changes for the social networking site, including a site redesign and a new program called Facebook Connect. From the page:

“We are going to see the big social networks start to decentralize into a series of social applications across the Web,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “I think we are at the beginning of a movement and the beginning of an industry.”

To carve out a piece of that future, the company announced Facebook Connect, a way that other Web sites can integrate parts of Facebook’s service. Web sites can ask users for their Facebook user name and password, instead of creating an identity verification system themselves, and offer their users the ability to import their list of friends from Facebook.

For example, the mobile service company Loopt, based in Mountain View, Calif., helps people find their friends and see what they are doing on a map on their mobile phone. It will use Facebook Connect so its users do not have to re-enter their connections to the friends they want to track.

Breaking out of the “walled garden” has been seen as the next paradigm shift for social networks for some time and this seems to be the first step toward carrying one’s identity across the open internet and connecting with others along the way.

Is this the beginning of the Social Web, where your friend list, wall and pack of roving zombies follow you across digital space? Will the popularity of Facebook allow them to set the standard for a potable digital identity in the coming months? Let ReputationDefender know what you think about decentralized social networking and the prospect of a new, digital ID issued through Facebook.

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ReputationDefender recently caught wind of this VentureBeat post that deals with Online Identity Management and Internet Privacy concerns.

Facebook had planned to work on the “Friend Connect” product with Google, but now it seems they’ve mothballed it. A post from Facebook’s developer blog explained that they have ceased working on Google’s “Friend Connect” project because of a violation of internal terms of service.

Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology, […] We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service.

Of course, the first thing we thought when we read this was “You mean you didn’t take a look at the project before you partnered up?” I mean, you couldn’t spare one engineer for an hour or two to look at this?

Facebook’s chief privacy officer Chris Kelly shed some light on the matter when said in an interview with CNET News.com that his company never actually had a formal partnership with Google in Friend Connect. “There wasn’t participation to start with. That was sort of a mis-impression that may have been formed by their release,” he said. “We weren’t briefed on how the Friend Connect product was going to work.”

Interesting move. Facebook has always maintained that they are all about the privacy of their users, and this move seems to reinforce that. But the boys over at Google disagree with the argument put forth stating: “We think that Friend Connect at all steps puts users in control of their own data, at every step of the way, and we’re disappointed that Facebook disabled their users’ ability to use Friend Connect with their Facebook friends.”

Can’t we all just get along?

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PC Authority is reporting that a fake Facebook page set up to humiliate a former friend has lead to severe, court-awarded damages.

A freelance photographer is facing a £22,000 bill after setting up a fake Facebook page that libelled a former classmate.

[SNIP]

[The Judge] awarded . . . £15,000 in damages and £2,000 for breach of privacy and gave his company £5,000 for libel.

“The significance of this case is that it shows that what you post is not harmless, but has consequences,” media lawyer, Jo Sanders, of Harbottle & Lewis, told the BBC.

“Sat at home or school or in the office, it’s easy to think of social networking sites as harmless fun, that it’s like chatting with friends, and that things posted there are either a joke or just a mischievous way of causing embarrassment. This ruling puts an end to that.”

Internet defamation and internet revenge often take the form of fake profiles and profile jacking. This ruling, and the hefty costs attached to it, shows how serious the notion of Online Reputation Management is for the courts in a world where we are increasingly identified by our virtual identities.

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