NPSC Blog

Wired magazine has reported on a new startup, called ReputationDefender (note the lack of a space between the two words, a sure sign that this company is certified Web 2.0™), whose mission in life is to:

…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.

My first reaction on reading this was w00t! I’m in the clear you are kidding, right?. Then, upon more considered reflection, I decided they were not and, while RD are unlikely to crack the sort of Web 2.0 jackpot that YouTube managed, they will probably do very nicely preying on that wonderful mix of human frailty that is a combination of gullibility and youthful indiscretion.

We all have had those moments that we would like to forget or, more importantly, have forgotten. Unfortunately, now many of those moments are published on the web, generally courtesy of people we loosely refer to as “friends”. Now, thanks to the good people at RD, you can rest easy, knowing that those pictures of you and your colleague doing the “lambada” at the christmas party will no longer appear when you egosurf.

Apparently, the business case for the firm rests on the interesting statistic that

26 percent of hiring managers say they have used search engines to research potential employees, and one in 10 has looked on a social networking website.

26 percent? I would have thought that would be a conservative estimate. If I was in HR, I would pretty much restrict my quality control to googling - why deal with the mundane (ie, actually reading the rank fiction that is passed off as a resumé or the fulsome praise of an employer who is only too keen to offload a freeloader) when you can cut straight to the tawdry and the scandalous?

Will this service really help anyone? Who knows. Why should we care? It is about reputation management -albeit an odd sort of retroactive variant- and it is a reminder of the changing environment in which we work.

Oh, and for the record, as I have noted before, in the age of Google, once it is posted, it is there for good. So before you hit Enter, make sure that you are happy for whatever it is to stay there for a long, long time…