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In this time of terrible need for our fellow world citizens in Haiti, please join me in supporting relief organizations such as the Red Cross by giving at http://www.redcross.org/ or by texting “Haiti” to
90999 (to give $10).  I made a personal donation this morning online to the Red Cross International Response Fund.  Please join me.

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.

Today all the world remembers the tragedy of September 11th, 2001. The ReputationDefender team extends its thoughts and prayers to the families of those who were lost, and to the American and allied armed forces now operating abroad in harm’s way.  We wish you a safe return.  This native New Yorker remembers the beauty of the Twin Towers and looks forward to the day in which a new structure stands in its place.  Here in America, there is always hope, there is always a better day if we want it enough.

ReputationDefender CEO Michael Fertik will be on air with Fox Radio affiliates across the country tomorrow (Wednesday) morning.  Grab your thermos of coffee and tune into your local station for a good review of proposed legislation supporting Internet Privacy.