Vengeance is so easy on the Web
Terrorist Attack |
Originally uploaded by beckster.
I’ve been thinking a lot about online reputation lately. Maureen Dowd, in her new book “Are Men Necessary“, talks about how it’s common for people to Google their dates before going out with them to get a sense for who they are. Given how much of our lives are moving online, a quick online search is a big part of a first impression.
So have you Googled yourself lately? I have, and I was somewhat surprised at the results. First, there were several items that were ancient (in Internet time) that made the front page, taking priority over newer, more relevant, more search engine friendly pages. For instance, I can’t believe this is still up: an old, loose transcription of a Seybold panel I was on with Jeff Veen, Peter Merholz and others back in ‘98. These things can follow us around in ways that are unexpected.
Ironically, in writing this post I discovered a link to a Forbes piece I was quoted in from 2000, where I list some favorite sites. Amongst them was Google, and I gave an example of its utility:
www.google.com
The best tool for finding compromising Web information on associates and business partners. While I was on the phone with a VP we’re trying to recruit, I did a quick Google search. The first link led to a quote from him on a windsurfing-enthusiast site. It gave me an opportunity to subtly pitch the walking distance from our office to the Bay—a great spot for wind surfing.
That’s a pretty benign use case. Back then, if someone came up in a Google search it was because they had a personal home page, an online resume or a company bio.
Blogs are changing the game, revealing just how fragile our reputations really are. Bill Lazar, with whom I keep having excellent exchanges, mentioned me in his Tag Camp post and this is now the fifth or sixth search result when you search for my name. His original post had some minor errors in it, which he promptly corrected after I pointed them out. This got me thinking: God, it would be easy to damage someone’s reputation with a single blog post.
Earlier this week, we had a run-in with a founder of a new Web2.0 application we were checking out. We had a technical problem, and emailed the founder for help. Instead of a gracious reply we received an email back accusing us of maliciously nosing around his system. It was a mean little dose of vitriol, and I thought for a moment of writing about my unfortunate experience, with his name prominent in the text. It would have been so easy.
Of course, it probably would have boomeranged back onto me, but that’s not the point. Not everyone is going to think it through. There’s no filter between a person’s experience of a subject, them writing it straight onto their blog, and the search crawlers munching it down for prominent display on the next search for the subject’s name. We’ve seen big companies do damage control in the face of “flamethrowers”, but what about individuals? You never know when you’ll wake up and discover you’ve been attacked in the most public of ways.
While the whole idea of a fragile reputation is frightening, there is a big upside. The fear of public and lasting retribution has the potential to keep us all on our best behavior. And that’s nothing to sneeze at.
January 30th, 2006 at 9:55 pm
Surfing For Windsurfers
Be careful when you post about windsurfing!…
February 4th, 2006 at 1:39 pm
Someone will come up with an identity management solution that will handle 99.999% of the needs probably sooner rather than later though no doubt we’ll still be faced with out and out fraud issues in an ever-escalating arms race. David Brin’s Transparent Society (http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/Reviews/Transparent.html) has much good to say on the topic.
February 5th, 2006 at 1:00 am
I love David Brin’s work. His pieces in Salon about Star Wars and Tolkien were unforgettable. He really articulates the darkside of trading democratic progress for an orderly, “safe” society based on elitist rule. This book you mention, Bill, sounds very much in this tradition.
Given the volume of information I publish about myself on blogs, online communities, flickr, etc, I’m obviously a believer in the benefits of transparency in personal information, particularly as a method of fighting the monolithic forces that would . I think the oft ballyhooed concern over privacy is to some degree a manufactured fear which benefits the big corporations that have historically hoarded consumer data. I’ll write more about this in a future post.
I agree that we will see a growing number of solutions for people to track and manage their identities and reputations online. Most of what I’m seeing is focused on creating reputation systems like ebay’s which are portable across many sites. That’s great for creating trust between personas in online transactions and communities. However, it’s a much messier problem to manage a a personal reputation when anyone can publish anything they want about you, and search engines index pages in unpredictable ways.