When Salina Rahim saw the MySpace page she nearly reeled back in her chair. The name and photograph were hers, but the profile description was complete fiction.
“I would have been horrified, absolutely horrified, if any family members had seen that,” Salina says from her tidy, one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles.
The profile described the exploits of a lusty “cougar” obsessed with sex and on the prowl. Even the book section read, “I’m too busy trying to please men to read books.”
It was piled on heavy enough, she said, to sound like it came from the imagination of a man — her rejected ex-boyfriend. To increase her torment, he took G-rated photos she had given him and added X-rated images of other women he found on porn sites.
Salina Rahim hired Reputation Defender to help her take on an online impersonator
Problems like Salina's are by no means limited to MySpace. With the explosion of social networking on the Web, many people maintain profiles on multiple sites, giving potential cyber-bullies plenty of targets.
And the task of removing unwanted personal information from the Web can be daunting. Just this month, a report in the New York Times highlighted the difficulties some users encountered in fully deleting their Facebook profiles.
For Salina, a modest 35-year-old fashion design student born in Great Britain to Indian parents, it was a devastating blow to her good name and reputation. It was also potentially dangerous — 75 MySpace users emailed her looking for a “good time.”
Salina confronted her ex-boyfriend and says he admitted to creating the profile. She decided to get a restraining order against him, which provided some protection against future harassment but did nothing to destroy the bogus MySpace account. We contacted the man named in her restraining order, but he claimed not to know her.
Next Salina emailed a generic MySpace customer service account but says the response left her confused and didn’t help bring down the page. That’s when she contacted a company she had heard about on a TV talk show: Reputation Defender.
Less than two years old, Reputation Defender is the brainchild of a savvy, shaggy-haired 29-year-old Harvard Law School graduate named Michael Fertik. He had the foresight to see potential value and profit in straining out some of the garbage that flows thick in the Internet’s information pipeline.
Michael Fertik founded Reputation Defender to help clients take control of their online identities
“A lot of the stuff that is put on the Web … that victimizes our clients has a strongly censoring impact on their lives,” says Fertik. “They don’t want to go out anymore, they don’t want to date, they don’t want to go to class, they don’t want to go to work.… It can take two or 20 minutes to destroy someone on the Web, and it can take hundreds of hours to repair it.”
In Salina’s case, Reputation Defender got the fake MySpace page destroyed within six weeks.
"Think of everything you put on the Web as a possible tattoo." — Michael Fertik
Fertik says the company uses a cooperative approach, finding the right person within an organization and appealing to them on a human level, rather than threatening litigation.
While some clients like Salina are trying to stop the spread of lies on the Internet, others are simply trying to clean up past indiscretions that have become part of their online identities — drunken or revealing photos, for example, that could torpedo future employment or relationships.
It works like this: Clients fill out a personal questionnaire that will be used in Reputation Defender’s deep search techniques. For a subscription of $9.95 a month, you get a monthly report of where and how you’re popping up on the Web. Don’t like what you see? For $29.95 per item, Reputation Defender will attempt to get it destroyed.
Reputation Defender employees scour the Internet for content about their clients
“Oh, every three days we get approached by some kind of crook or another who asks us to remove some evidence of past crime, and usually we just kick them off the system right away,” says Fertik.
He says the inquiries from the criminal sector of the population are a natural by-product of being a pioneer in the Internet clean-up business. And while Fertik’s company won’t help them, he believes there will be less ethical ones that will, either through illegal hacking of records or aggressive bullying and threats of litigation.
But to emphasize just how complex and fluid this field is, Fertik says he approves of some Internet companies who take on clients trying to clean up past episodes of juvenile delinquency.
“If you had an incident with alcohol when you were 15 or 16 and you know it was a mistake and you cleaned up your life and you moved on and now you’re very productive and you’re in graduate school and you’re on your way to a great career and then all of a sudden the Web remembers, this could end up hurting you.”
But this raises a serious question, one critics of Internet clean-up companies like Reputation Defender often pose: Does their work actually censor the Web’s defining characteristic — the free flow of information?
Fertik says he simply provides a level playing field for his clients. The Internet, he argues, provides an extraordinary long shelf life for unflattering words and images and gives attackers who know how to game search engine algorithms an advantage.
“I think that what we are doing is helping a search engine make sure it’s finding the best and most accurate and most reliable results -- instead of someone’s claim about the fact that maybe you smell bad,” says Fertik.
While a new Pew Research study shows that people are much more aware of their online identities than they were in the past — one in three Internet users will search his or her own name, for example — Fertik believes that really protecting ourselves means approaching the Web in a more thoughtful way.
“You should be really, really smart about what you put on the Web,” says Fertik. “Think of everything you put on the Web as a possible tattoo. Think of everything on the Web as a possible imprint on your forehead, as a possible scarlet letter for yourself that can just hang around your neck like an albatross.”
But for innocent victims like Salina Rahim, who get smeared by someone else, the offending material may be gone but its impact still lingers.
“I don’t really interact or participate in the social networking Web sites at all,” she says. “I just feel that that can come back and haunt you.”
Producer - Jamie Rubin
Video Editor - Steve Neilson
"California teen" photos courtesy of the Catsouras Family
Comments and Feedback