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Clean Your Web Mistakes



So what do you think the implications and extrapolations of something like this would be?

The mistakes you make on the internet can live forever — unless you hire somebody to clean up after you.

A new startup, ReputationDefender, will act on your behalf by contacting data hosting services and requesting the removal of any materials that threaten your good social standing. Any web citizen willing to pay ReputationDefender’s modest service fees can ask the company to seek and destroy embarrassing office party photos, blog posts detailing casual drug use or saucy comments on social networking profiles.

The company produces monthly reports on its clients’ online identities for a cost of $10 to $16 per month, depending on the length of the contract. The client can request the removal of any material on the report for a charge of $30 per instance.

Based strictly on their website design, company name and nothing else, I’m guessing this company won’t have much of a lifespan. Looks like it is designed to be bought before they actually *do* much of anything. But it is still a smart idea and an “under-served market” as they say. I can’t imagine how successful they will be. What kind of bullshit strong-arm tactics are they going to have to use to convince website owners and hosting companies to remove incriminating stuff from online?

Are they going to start paying me a cut of that $30 to remove stupid comments you wish you left on my website? Is that how this will work?

It seems pretty much impossible to pull off without some kind of massive re-envisioning of how we understand identity, especially identity online. If we had an ethic that said “everything by me or about me belongs to me” then I could see something like this having a fair measure of success. But we don’t have that. We have something much more convoluted.

Plus, how does all this hook into identity theft? What if somebody besides me pretends to be me and then goes about removing traces of my identity online by way of a service like this?

If nothing else, this is an interesting bit of data to throw into the machine I’ve been constructing in my head lately about who controls identity and whether or not the power of the state is that it maintains a monopoly over it. More on that soon…

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2 Reader Responses

  1. JohnEmerson Says:
    November 9th, 2006 at 1:21 pm

    I’ve worked with a few webhosting companies, and currently run my own. And from that experience, I have to say, any worth their salt won’t cave in easily to these kinds of things. Partially it just comes down to emotion.

    I’ve had to deal with a few people who’ve decided to go the route of police and litigation over direct confrontation with someone. As a rule, they’ve moved me from an initial sympathy to annoyance pretty quickly. If you can imagine the schoolchild who always ran to the teacher at the slightest cause, made a million times more bitter as they continued to persist in that behavior with police and lawyers, you can get what these types of situation are usually like. While the people on the other side are often not the most pleasant either, they’re still the person who decided to fight with their own words and not that of a contract hitman.

    But, in any case, in the end the personal element doesn’t matter. Companies in the service industries live or die by their willingness to step up to bat for their clients. Not doing so can provide short term gain, but I think any who cave into demands like this will discover pretty quickly what happens when they get a sour reputation among the people who’d been promised attention to their needs.

  2. Tim Boucher Says:
    November 9th, 2006 at 4:56 pm

    Hey, if you don’t mind my asking, what’s your web hosting company? If you’d rather email me, thats cool!



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