As she puts it, Christina Parascandola has the bad luck of having an unusual name.
The 37-year-old attorney was mentioned in news reports and blog posts about a heated dispute between residents of her Washington neighborhood and a noisy local bar that hosted some gay-themed events. Parascandola was worried that she came across in the articles as homophobic, particularly to potential employers.
When you Google my name, it looks like I'm some kind of monster," she says.
Parascandola set out to minimize the bad publicity. She hired a company called ReputationDefender Inc. that promises to help individuals "search and destroy" negative information about them on the Internet.
Businesses and others have long employed so-called search-engine-optimization techniques to try to make themselves appear higher in Web-search results. Now services like ReputationDefender and DefendMyName are charging fees that can run into hundreds of dollars to help clients remove or downplay unflattering online information.
The companies cite success stories of customers who have buried snippy blog comments, embarrassing photos or critical mentions of their names. But, as Parascandola found out, the services can't wipe everything off the Internet, and their efforts can backfire.
ReputationDefender sent a letter to political blog Positive Liberty asking it to remove Parascandola's name from a critical entry on the grounds the post was "outdated and invasive." Blogger Jason Kuznicki refused, and posted a new entry mocking the request. He says he "had a good laugh over it."
Michael Fertik, a 28-year-old Harvard Law graduate who founded ReputationDefender in October, said misfires represent a "tiny percentage" of the company's efforts to fight the "permanent and public" nature of negative online content. For fees starting at $10 a month, the 10-person Louisville, Ky.-based company scours blogs, photo-sharing sites and social networks for information about a client, then charges $30 for each item the user instructs it to try to correct or remove. The service won't say how many customers it has.
He declined to say how many times ReputationDefender has succeeded in having content removed. He cited recent examples including a man whose ex-lover posted revealing photos to a Web site; an identity-theft victim who had his personal information published on a blog and a medical student who had discussed his own clinical depression in an old newsgroup that he didn't know was public. Fertik declined to identify those clients.
Janel Lee, a mortgage loan closer in Minong, Wis., sought ReputationDefender out after her ex-boyfriend began posting her work and cell phone numbers in response to several questions on Yahoo Answers, including "What is 50 Cent's phone number?"
She got 15 to 20 calls a day, sometimes as late as 3 a.m. One after-hours voicemail, presumably intended for the rapper, was a lengthy rap performance. "I sing blues, jazz and rock. This was painful," said Lee.
Lee said she contacted Yahoo Inc. directly but was unable to get most of the information taken down. So she paid ReputationDefender about $240 for a two-year membership, plus about $150 for the posts that the company, over three months, got removed. "It was quite a great relief knowing that someone was working on it for me," she said. Fertik said Yahoo removed the information after being contacted by ReputationDefender.
A Yahoo spokeswoman said the company doesn't discuss individual customer-care cases, but that if someone's contact information is posted on Yahoo Answers without approval, the site will remove it.
ReputationDefender begins by sending emails on behalf of its clients to Web-site owners. The letters typically introduce the company, identify the client and the offending content, and ask the recipient to remove it. The letters don't make threats -- Fertik, despite his training, and others at ReputationDefender aren't lawyers -- but instead try to appeal to recipients' sense of fairness: "Like our clients, and perhaps like you, we think the Internet is sometimes unnecessarily hurtful to the privacy and reputations of everyday people," one such letter reads.
"The first thing we do is we just ask, very politely," said Fertik. "Thereafter, we can get less polite," including contacting a site's Internet service provider to complain about the site. When Web site owners don't respond to its letters, ReputationDefender sometimes suggests that clients hire a lawyer, though Fertik said that happens infrequently.
Kuznicki, the blogger, said he refused to take down the information about Parascandola because he merely included published information and expressed personal opinions. "I was surprised to get a notice like this, because I don't run an unprofessional or defamatory blog," said Kuznicki, a Bowie, Md., policy researcher for a think tank.
Parascandola criticized ReputationDefender for sending a letter directly to someone who had already written critical things of her -- an approach she considered clumsy. "I certainly would not have authorized that," she said. Fertik said he apologized to Parascandola and refunded her fees.
While Fertik said such problems are rare, takedown attempts that go awry can generate considerable unwanted attention. Stuart Neilson, a statistics instructor at a university in Cork, Ireland, claimed on his personal Web site that he was the victim of "academic bullying" by a colleague. After the other professor hired ReputationDefender to try to have the accusations removed, Neilson rebuffed the firm and posted his exchanges with the company on his site. Those posts received wider attention when they were republished on a blog devoted to faculty discord in academia. "It has merely generated additional publicity," he said.
ReputationDefender also sent a takedown request to Consumerist, a Gawker Media blog that had written about a man who was briefly jailed for harassment after repeatedly calling online travel agent Priceline.com Inc. for a refund. The letter asked the blog to remove or alter the archived post, saying it was "outdated and disturbing" to its client. Consumerist editor Ben Popken blasted the request with a profanely titled entry, calling it an attempt at censorship. "It's not like we're spreading libel," he said. "They were trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube."
ReputationDefender's Fertik said the company is no longer sending letters to irreverent blogs like Consumerist, which may be more likely to mock the company's efforts. "We are no longer taking those kinds of risks with those kinds of outlets," he said.
DefendMyName, a two-year-old unit of Portland, Maine-based marketing firm QED Media Group LLC, markets itself as a way to remove negative mentions from search-engine results. What it actually does, said founder Rob Russo, is attempt to bury them below promotional sites, blogs and forum postings it creates for clients. The company's rates start at $1,000 a month, he said, though he declined to say how many clients it has.
Adding positive content to combat negative mentions isn't against Google Inc.'s rules, a company spokeswoman said, as long as the content is original and the companies don't use manipulative techniques to push pages higher in search results. She declined to comment on individual reputation companies.
Chris Dellarocas, a University of Maryland associate professor who studies how reputations are built online, said the services are fighting a growing trend of sites that let users recommend, rank and opine on other people, from RateMyProfessor to Rapleaf, a site for people to rate each other after business transactions.
Reputation-management companies "have a place in this new ecosystem, but a limited one," he said. "Let's not forget that all of these mediums are protected by the First Amendment," he added. "The question is, what is defamation and what is a genuinely deserved negative comment?"
http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/bal-reputation0618,1,7610253.story?ctrack=1&cset=true
