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.

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.

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.

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village

Here at ReputationDefender, The Onion has a special place in our hearts.  They have an amazing ability to capture current events in perfect satire. The Google Opt-Out Village may be a thing of fiction, but your online privacy shouldn’t be! MyPrivacy, MyReputation and MyEdge are there to protect you!

Known for their eclectic mix of industry insiders and academic researchers, Think Tanks play an important part in shaping policy on a variety of issues. While there are already a number of Think Tanks in Washington, D.C. dedicated to privacy, the relatively new Future of Privacy Forum (FPF), merits particular attention.

Established in November 2008, FPF is headed by Jules Polonetsky, the former Chief Privacy Officer of AOL, and Christopher Wolf, a partner at Washington D.C. law firm Proskauer Rose LLP. According to the organization’s official homepage, the FPF “advocates for privacy advances that promote transparency and user control in a manner that is practical for business to implement to ensure personal autonomy for all who seek to embrace the benefits of our digital society.”

While the FPF boilerplate sounds good, we especially like that “personal autonomy” bit; ars technica reports that the group’s corporate ties have made some anxious about their promises.

From the article:

The Q&A session, however, quickly turned from the private to the pecuniary, with some pointed questions about the organization’s funding. The Forum’s initial money has come primarily from AT&T, with which Wolf’s firm has longstanding ties. Several online commentators, such as Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy, have worried that the Forum will act as a handmaiden of business, helping it preempt or dilute privacy legislation. Wolf, after all, was formerly chair of the Hands Off the Internet Coalition, a self-described consumer advocacy group that has often been characterized as an astroturf organization—an industry front dedicated to opposing net neutrality legislation. Polonetsky sought to confront those suspicions head on, denying that the group was an attempt to forestall legislation through promotion of self-regulation.

Besides Wolf’s connection to AT&T, questions of the FPF’s role in the net neutrality debate also arose.

Another—and, it should be noted, inconsistent—theory advanced by Saul Hansell of The New York Times holds that this is part of an ongoing feud between AT&T and Google that has its roots in the net neutrality debate. In this account, the Forum’s rationale is to level the playing field, ensuring that companies like Google don’t enjoy a competitive advantage in their ability to target advertising to consumers by using their personal data at the application level, something that ISPs are prevented from exploiting directly.

One of Google’s privacy attorneys has been invited to sit on the Forum’s advisory board, which may cast doubt on this suggestion. That invitee, however, hasn’t yet accepted or rejected the offer, which may signal that the search giant has suspicions of its own on this front.

Empowering individuals to use the Internet responsibly and pro-actively goes to the very core of ReputationDefender, and any government agency or Think Tank that works toward that goal is a potential privacy advocate. The Future of Privacy Forum is certainly something that we’ll be keeping our eyes on here at the ReputationDefender Blog.

Of course, like with any new technology, there are certain trade offs. With the prevalence of cell phone cameras, it has become much easier for people to take and share pictures instantly. In some cases this has helped lead to justice, such as the recent arrest of an Oakland BART police officer for the killing of an unarmed man. Unfortunately, it has also led to an increase in good-old fashioned virtual voyeurism. One of the main places where this kind of camera phone use occurs is on the subway. Michael Daly discussed the issue in a recent editorial for the New York Daily News.

Quoting from the article:

You do not need to be a celebrity to have embarrassing images of you flashed before the public.

Yawn, doze, pass out, smooch, weep on the subway and you risk one of these pauper-azzis posting your picture on a site such as Flickr.

A woman who sat despondent on a train with her face in her hands appears in a photo captioned “The Saddest Girl.”

“Nice shot,” reads a comment.

Women who fill out their jeans risk appearing along with captions such as “fat bimbo a–” and “big a–.” A pair of youngsters appears with the caption: “Two kids from my neighborhood … I’ve watched them grow into very unhappy fat kids.”

“Killer capture,” applauds a poster.

One sorry soul was snapped while suffering a lapse in personal hygiene.

“Nose Picker,” reads the caption.

Another nose picker appears with a comment reading: “Eeeew!”

[SNIP]

There are also those whose pictures have artistic value. This underground aesthetic dates to the time of the Great Depression, when the renowned photographer Walker Evans rode the subway with a hidden camera poking from between the buttons of his overcoat.

“The guard is down and the mask is off,” he once said. “Even more than in lone bedrooms [where there are mirrors], people’s faces are in naked repose down in the subway.”

The reason for the underground “naked repose” is the psychic privacy we grant each other aboard the subway. We recognize we are trapped together with greatly reduced expectation of private space. We therefore allow another sort of distance, which joins with anonymity to accord a kind of solitude even when people are pressed in all around you.

Whether you’re applying for a job, applying to school, or even going out on a blind date; owning your Google search results is key to finding success. Merely setting your profile to private is not a guarantee of protection in the Internet age, which means constant vigilance in monitoring your online reputation is a must.