Friday April 11, 2008

Webutation, or: How to save your reputation on the WWW

A few days ago, National Public Radio broadcasted an interesting clip about a new internet company called reputationdefender.com. One of their main products is named "myreputation" and offers to compile a comprehensive report of all information available through various web-based services: their website mentions social networks (e.g., MySpace, Facebook), professional review websites, blogs, online news sources, photo, audio and video sharing sites and "millions of additional sites on the 'open Internet'".

For an additional fee, the company offers to delete this data through its "proprietary DESTROY process," which, according to the NPR broadcast, is largely achieved through legal means, i.e., the company contacts the content provider and requests the deletion of the information.
What does this have to do with libraries? As librarians, it is not just our duty to provide our patrons with authoritative information on any topic they are interested in. Even more so, we should enable them to discover and critically evaluate information for themselves. And part of this evaluation process is not only being able to determine what information they should trust as consumers, but also as providers, meaning they should be able to decide what information they make publically available and what impact that information will have on their lives in the future. Instead of trusting services such as reputationdefender to clean up after them and remove images or public comments once those have become embarrassing (e.g., when applying for a job), they should become aware of the ubiquity of this information and judge whether that image from last week's party should really be publicly available.