Online Reputation

The following online articles uncover a scary big brother scenario for the future of our reputations inhibiting one's ability to gain future employment due to some silly college photographs posted onto a college website such as facebook and myspace:

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,72063-0.html?tw=rss.index

Goffman's "Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" boiled down in wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Everyday_Life
Listen to: NPR on "Startups Help Clean Up Online Reputations" http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6462504
Business Week Online: "Are Online Reputations Portable?" http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2005/11/are_online_repu.ht

The reality is that college students are getting slammed by future employers and barred from jobs due to an evening of normal college rite of passage. College students are being educated about the new horrors that await them due to their "fun times" they want to share with their friends. Perhaps the education should go the other way around towards employers as well. Employers that use such tactics for employment should be boycotted with a list of their names published for their "police state" tactics. Companies also happen to hire consulting companies to do the dirty work for them and they should be sifted out as well.

In the meantime, a company helping to protect the innocent from these busy bodies is Reputation Defender. http://www.reputationdefender.com/ Much like the way a credit repair agency would operate, Reputation Defender uses competer technology and human search ingenuity to locate damaging content about an individual and have it removed for a fee.

Reputation Defender has a brilliant idea and I give it 5 stars! In the meantime, more needs to be done to right back to defend our lives and freedoms from this invasive behavior. Start listing the names of these human rights violators! Fight back!