A recent survey by Microsoft, for instance, finds fully three-quarters of American recruiters and human resources professionals perform online searches into the activities of potential employees.
Photograph by: Les Bazso, PNG files
Most people have learned — some the hard way — that the Internet's memory makes elephants look forgetful by comparison, with the skeletons in our online closets having bones so sharp as to impale careers, marriages and certainly reputations.
Almost overnight, these challenges have given rise to an entire cottage industry of businesses that manage people's Internet images for them. There are even cyber scholars that foresee a time, not far from now, in which "reputation brokers" will aggregate our e-activities into an annual score that gauges our value as employees, friends and life partners.
Think credit reports, but for morals instead of money.
"The Internet makes everyone a public figure," says Michael Fertik, CEO of the online image management firm ReputationDefender, of which an estimated 97 per cent of clients are ordinary citizens.
"Even if you don't put a lot of stuff about yourself online, someone else is doing it for you . . . So you either do something about it, or learn to live with it."
Fertik's customers pay his company anywhere from $4 per month to $1,000 per year to help manage personal Google search results, remove their names from corporate databases, perform online damage-control, and closely monitor their Internet footprints.
Because someone, somewhere, will be following that same electronic trail in deciding whether they want those people as co-workers, students, or even Saturday-night dates.
A recent survey by Microsoft, for instance, finds fully three-quarters of American recruiters and human resources professionals perform online searches into the activities of potential employees.
The Internet startup Klout will analyze a person's social influence and authority based on their Twitter account. Pipl scours online photos, public records, court documents, academic journals and forum postings to reveal a person's "deep-web" history.
Even a basic Facebook search can turn up surprisingly intimate results, with many users having inadvertently left parts, or all, of their personal profiles open to the public.
And as more and more of these reputation queries are performed, experts say the greater the likelihood companies will seek a one-stop shopping source for aggregated information — think eBay star ratings, social media activities, old blog entries, comments made in online discussion groups, and cached documents.
This possibility is so likely, in fact, that there's already speculation about how the system could be legally navigated. Harvard cyberlaw professor Jonathan Zittrain, for one, supports the idea of being able to declare "reputation bankruptcy," wiping clean the digital slate to start fresh every 10 years or so.
The hollow spot in one's history would be the price paid — and a high one at that, according to a Canadian Internet scholar.
"We don't trust people who are blank slates these days," says Sidneyeve Matrix, professor of media at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont. "It's like that saying, 'If you don't show up on Google, you don't exist.'"
But she isn't convinced such a tidy approach could be implemented anyway, noting that knowledge — particularly of others — is power.
"The problem with reputation reformatting, or a digital reset, is that information about us exists on privately owned and corporate servers," says Matrix. "So we can never really erase everything."
For now, she believes the best defence is a good offence. That is, being proactive about online image management and making sure that one's own voice is the loudest in the digital din.
"If I'm very active online, one bad piece of information is probably going to be buried; that's just the nature of Google algorithms," explains Matrix. "But if I'm not very active online and the only thing that comes up about me is something terrible, that matters hugely because it can really shut down opportunities."
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