How do you maintain a good on-line reputation? What can you
do when others post extremely embarrassing comments (or images) about you? How
can they be removed – or at least made less visible to search engines, to
prevent others from stumbling across the relevant links?
I’ve recently been advising someone
who is very concerned about what has happened to them: “For years there has been an
offensive post about me on the internet. It is embarrassing and I have wished
for years that it would get removed. However, the website where it was posted has
closed down and I have no means of contacting them.”
Despite Google’s attempts to remove the offending material
from its search results, the victim remains concerned that others will find it.
Not even the fabled “right to be forgotten” proposal in the Data
Protection Regulation would have been of much help in this instance – as the
material was originally posted by an American company that has folded - but who
had passed their data assets to another American company before closing down.
How can victims be reassured that embarrassing material
won’t be shadowing them for years to come?
Of course I appreciate the tension between freedom of
expression, on the one hand, and censorship, on the other. But I also
appreciate the anguish that victims can feel when it appears (at least to them)
that they are being unfairly hounded.
Perhaps,
in time, the shadow from the embarrassing material will ship down search
rankings, as more favourable material about an individual is posted.
But the
internet (and particularly the Internet Archive) does not forget. Somehow we have
to come to terms with this reality. Just as we need to accept that data
controllers have rights too. Particularly in terms of the information assets
they’ve legitimately acquired.
What’s most poignant is that the person I’m advising is just
17 years old. Having had the shadow of this material around their neck for a
few years already, you can imagine how they might feel if they were told that
there was no hope that this material would ever be placed beyond the reach of
internet users.
If you can’t afford the services of reputation management
companies like Iginyte, then who can you turn to?
Source:
Image credit:
.
