Facebook's partial retreat has not quieted the desire to do something about
an urgent problem. All around the world, political leaders, scholars and
citizens are searching for responses to the challenge of preserving control
of our identities in a digital world that never forgets. Are the most
promising solutions going to be technological? Legislative? Judicial?
Ethical? A result of shifting social norms and cultural expectations? Or
some mix of the above? Alex Tuerk, the French data-protection commissioner,
has called for a "constitutional right to oblivion" that would allow
citizens to maintain a greater degree of anonymity online and in public
places. In Argentina, the writers Alejandro Tortolini and Enrique Quagliano
have started a campaign to "reinvent forgetting on the Internet," exploring
a range of political and technological ways of making data disappear. In
February, the European Union helped finance a campaign called "Think B4 U
post!" that urges young people to consider the "potential
consequences" of
publishing photos of themselves or their friends without "thinking
carefully" and asking permission. And in the United States, a group of
technologists, legal scholars and cyberthinkers are exploring ways of
recreating the possibility of digital forgetting. These approaches share the
common goal of reconstructing a form of control over our identities: the
ability to reinvent ourselves, to escape our pasts and to improve the selves
that we present to the world.

REPUTATION BANKRUPTCY AND TWITTERGATION

A few years ago, at the giddy dawn of the Web 2.0 era -- so called to mark
the rise of user-generated online content -- many technological theorists
assumed that self-governing communities could ensure, through the
self-correcting wisdom of the crowd, that all participants enjoyed the
online identities they deserved. Wikipedia is one embodiment of the faith
that the wisdom of the crowd can correct most mistakes -- that a Wikipedia
entry for a small-town mayor, for example, will reflect the reputation he
deserves. And if the crowd fails -- perhaps by turning into a digital mob --
Wikipedia offers other forms of redress. Those who think their Wikipedia
entries lack context, because they overemphasize a single personal or
professional mistake, can petition a group of select editors that decides
whether a particular event in someone's past has been given "undue weight."
For example, if the small-town mayor had an exemplary career but then was
arrested for drunken driving, which came to dominate his Wikipedia entry, he
can petition to have the event put in context or made less prominent.

In practice, however, self-governing communities like Wikipedia -- or
algorithmically self-correcting systems like Google -- often leave people
feeling misrepresented and burned. Those who think that their online
reputations have been unfairly tarnished by an isolated incident or two now
have a practical option: consulting a firm like ReputationDefender, which
promises to clean up your online image. ReputationDefender was founded by
Michael Fertik, a Harvard Law School graduate who was troubled by the idea
of young people being forever tainted online by their youthful
indiscretions. "I was seeing articles about the 'Lord of the Flies' behavior
that all of us engage in at that age," he told me, "and it felt un-American
that when the conduct was online, it could have permanent effects on the
speaker and the victim. The right to new beginnings and the right to
self-definition have always been among the most beautiful American ideals."

ReputationDefender, which has customers in more than 100 countries, is the
most successful of the handful of reputation-related start-ups that have
been growing rapidly after the privacy concerns raised by Facebook and
Google. (ReputationDefender recently raised $15 million in new venture
capital.) For a fee, the company will monitor your online reputation,
contacting Web sites individually and asking them to take down offending
items. In addition, with the help of the kind of search-optimization
technology that businesses use to raise their Google profiles,
ReputationDefender can bombard the Web with positive or neutral information
about its customers, either creating new Web pages or by multiplying links
to existing ones to ensure they show up at the top of any Google search.
(Services begin from $10 a month to $1,000 a year; for challenging cases,
the price can rise into the tens of thousands.) By automatically raising the
Google ranks of the positive links, ReputationDefender pushes the negative
links to the back pages of a Google search, where they're harder to find.
"We're hearing stories of employers increasingly asking candidates to open
up Facebook pages in front of them during job interviews," Fertik told me.
"Our customers include parents whose kids have talked about them on the
Internet -- 'Mom didn't get the raise'; 'Dad got fired'; 'Mom and Dad are
fighting a lot, and I'm worried they'll get a divorce.' "

Companies like ReputationDefender offer a promising short-term solution for
those who can afford it; but tweaking your Google profile may not be enough
for reputation management in the near future, as Web 2.0 swiftly gives way
to Web. 3.0 -- a world in which user-generated content is combined with a
new layer of data aggregation and analysis and live video. For example, the
Facebook application Photo Finder, by Face.com, uses facial-recognition and
social-connections software to allow you to locate any photo of yourself or
a friend on Facebook, regardless of whether the photo was "tagged" -- that
is, the individual in the photo was identified by name. At the moment, Photo
Finder allows you to identify only people on your contact list, but as
facial-recognition technology becomes more widespread and sophisticated, it
will almost certainly challenge our expectation of anonymity in public.
People will be able to snap a cellphone picture (or video) of a stranger,
plug the images into Google and pull up all tagged and untagged photos of
that person that exist on the Web.

In the nearer future, Internet searches for images are likely to be combined
with social-network aggregator search engines, like today's Spokeo and Pipl,
which combine data from online sources -- including political contributions,
blog posts, YouTube videos, Web comments, real estate listings and photo
albums. Increasingly these aggregator sites will rank people's public and
private reputations, like the new Web site Unvarnished, a reputation
marketplace where people can write anonymous reviews about anyone. In the
Web 3.0 world, Fertik predicts, people will be rated, assessed and scored
based not on their creditworthiness but on their trustworthiness as good
parents, good dates, good employees, good baby sitters or good insurance
risks.

Anticipating these challenges, some legal scholars have begun imagining new
laws that could allow people to correct, or escape from, the reputation
scores that may govern our personal and professional interactions in the
future. Jonathan Zittrain, who teaches cyberlaw at Harvard Law School,
supports an idea he calls "reputation bankruptcy," which would
give people a
chance to wipe their reputation slates clean and start over. To illustrate
the problem, Zittrain showed me an iPhone app called Date Check, by
Intelius, that offers a "sleaze detector" to let you investigate people
you're thinking about dating -- it reports their criminal histories, address
histories and summaries of their social-networking profiles. Services like
Date Check, Zittrain said, could soon become even more sophisticated, rating
a person's social desirability based on minute social measurements -- like
how often he or she was approached or avoided by others at parties (a
ranking that would be easy to calibrate under existing technology using
cellphones and Bluetooth). Zittrain also speculated that, over time, more
and more reputation queries will be processed by a handful of de facto
reputation brokers -- like the existing consumer-reporting agencies Experian
and Equifax, for example -- which will provide ratings for people based on
their sociability, trustworthiness and employability.

To allow people to escape from negative scores generated by these services,
Zittrain says that people should be allowed to declare "reputation
bankruptcy" every 10 years or so, wiping out certain categories of ratings
or sensitive information. His model is the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which
requires consumer-reporting agencies to provide you with one free credit
report a year -- so you can dispute negative or inaccurate information --
and prohibits the agencies from retaining negative information about
bankruptcies, late payments or tax liens for more than 10 years. "Like
personal financial bankruptcy, or the way in which a state often seals a
juvenile criminal record and gives a child a 'fresh start' as an adult,"
Zittrain writes in his book "The Future of the Internet and How to
Stop It,"
"we ought to consider how to implement the idea of a second or third chance
into our digital spaces."

Another proposal, offered by Paul Ohm, a law professor at the University of
Colorado, would make it illegal for employers to fire or refuse to hire
anyone on the basis of legal off-duty conduct revealed in Facebook postings
or Google profiles. "Is it really fair for employers to know what you've put
in your Facebook status updates?" Ohm asks. "We could say that Facebook
status updates have taken the place of water-cooler chat, which employers
were never supposed to overhear, and we could pass a prohibition on the
sorts of information employers can and can't consider when they hire
someone."

Ohm became interested in this problem in the course of researching the ease
with which we can learn the identities of people from supposedly anonymous
personal data like movie preferences and health information. When Netflix,
for example, released 100 million purportedly anonymous records revealing
how almost 500,000 users had rated movies from 1999 to 2005, researchers
were able to identify people in the database by name with a high degree of
accuracy if they knew even only a little bit about their movie-watching
preferences, obtained from public data posted on other ratings sites.

Ohm says he worries that employers would be able to use
social-network-aggregator services to identify people's book and movie
preferences and even Internet-search terms, and then fire or refuse to hire
them on that basis. A handful of states -- including New York, California,
Colorado and North Dakota -- broadly prohibit employers from discriminating
against employees for legal off-duty conduct like smoking. Ohm suggests that
these laws could be extended to prevent certain categories of employers from
refusing to hire people based on Facebook pictures, status updates and other
legal but embarrassing personal information. (In practice, these laws might
be hard to enforce, since employers might not disclose the real reason for
their hiring decisions, so employers, like credit-reporting agents, might
also be required by law to disclose to job candidates the negative
information in their digital files.)

Another legal option for responding to online setbacks to your reputation is
to sue under current law. There's already a sharp rise in lawsuits known as
Twittergation -- that is, suits to force Web sites to remove slanderous or
false posts. Last year, Courtney Love was sued for libel by the fashion
designer Boudoir Queen for supposedly slanderous comments posted on Twitter,
on Love's MySpace page and on the designer's online marketplace-feedback
page. But even if you win a U.S. libel lawsuit, the Web site doesn't have to
take the offending material down any more than a newspaper that has lost a
libel suit has to remove the offending content from its archive.

Some scholars, therefore, have proposed creating new legal rights to force
Web sites to remove false or slanderous statements. Cass Sunstein, the Obama
administration's regulatory czar, suggests in his new book, "On Rumors,"
that there might be "a general right to demand retraction after a clear
demonstration that a statement is both false and damaging." (If a newspaper
or blogger refuses to post a retraction, they might be liable for damages.)
Sunstein adds that Web sites might be required to take down false postings
after receiving notice that they are false -- an approach modeled on the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which requires Web sites to remove content
that supposedly infringes intellectual property rights after receiving a
complaint.



Jeff Snyder, SysOp - Armageddon BBS  Visit us at endtimeprophecy.org port 23
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