Is Google the Enemy of the Truth?

Source: ReputationDefender Blog

Is Google the Enemy of the Truth?

Google has taught the world that great things can be free. More than any other company, Google’s existential and commercial constitution holds that information should be free to Internet readers, in exchange for some amount of advertising revenue.

But even Google cannot give us a free lunch. The costs of this Google-culture shift are appearing, and they are heavy. Newspapers across the country are imploding as they fail to replace lost subscription, classifieds, and print advertising revenue with online eyeballs dollars. Efforts to impose subscription fees on Internet readers have met with protest, scorn, or reader disappearance.

It’s not all Google’s fault. Newspapers–and TV and radio–have been slow to change. Cross-linking among sites, which generates strong search engine ranking, has come only lately to newspaper webpages. Traditional news media have likewise only recently started to make their pages “persistent”–so that they stay up on the web permanently–which adds to search visibility over time. (Both of these “rules” of Internet life were created, basically, by Google.)

But the expectation that “information must be free” is an article of faith among the Internet generation. This is a fatal problem for journalism. Someone has to pay reporters and editors. Online advertising revenue isn’t enough: according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, half of newspaper readers reach their content via the web, but newspapers generate less than 10% of their revenue from the Internet. That’s a formula for impending doom. The media industry is laying off heavily. According to the News Cycle blog, over the past 16 months, 27,000 newspaper employees have lost their jobs. When the economy comes back, some advertising revenue will return, but most of the papers will be gone, and the higher advertising rates won’t be sufficient to bring them back.

True, bloggers and amateur journalists are filling some of the void (see the citation in the previous paragraph). But it doesn’t take a genius to observe that bloggers are simply not subject to the same tenets that the formal editorial process demands. Moreover, the economic threat of liability for libelous publications has long imposed on professional outlets incentives to get their stories right. By contrast, nearly all bloggers have small enough incomes to be judgment proof, or they are anonymous, so the barrier to suing them is much higher. The net result is a lower quality of reporting and fact-finding.

Not all the papers will die. The top five in the US will most likely thrive. This may guarantee excellent coverage of New York, LA, Washington, Chicago, Wall Street, national politics, business, and global affairs. Very local police blotters may continue to blot. But who will cover Newark, St. Louis, Boston with regularity and care? What about the smaller cities? Who will gather sources and data for small stories that later make up the infrastructure supporting the larger, trendline stories that reach across towns, states, and decades?

Hope springs eternal. The new website True/Slant is intelligently mashing up economic features of traditional publishing, Digg, Arts & Letters Daily, and pay-for-play blogging to seek revenues. The New York Times, Boston Globe, and Washington Post are creatively tying long-term subscription revenue to technology hardware purchases in a deal struck with Amazon for discounted Kindles. David Carr recently suggested in the New York Times that the SEC should hire out-of-work investigative journalists to boost their fact-finding powers. News-gathering agencies seem to be considering, at long last, endowing themselves with long-term foundation-style support. Maybe enhanced feature sets like very-first-look breaking news feeds and searchable archive access will yield unexpected sources of revenue: Walter Isaacson has suggested that readers should pay for pieces that are costly to report. Americans find ways to fill vacuums, so there’s always reason for optimism, but, at scale, good reporting needs to be financially incentivized, and we haven’t yet found solutions.

And what happens if the reporting doesn’t get done? The quality of information will decline over time. The relatively good information gathered, analyzed, and published by professional organizations will be replaced with relatively bad information from unedited and consequence-free sources. Google will continue to do what it does best: find and present massive amounts of data to consumers hungry for information. But Google will, increasingly, be finding speculation, innuendo, sloppy reporting, and falsehood. It will not be finding the truth.

Sue Scheff: Online Protection and your Kids

As a parent advocate, I am proactive in helping parents keep their kids safe in cyberspace. One of my favorite services, which I believe is priceless for all families with kids online, is ReputationDefender. I have personally used their services for several years and have been completely satisfied. It is a cost-effective way to help protect your children while they surf.

What is MyChild?

MyChild by ReputationDefender scours the Internet for all references to your child or teen - by name, photography, screen name, or social network profiles - and packages it to you in an easy-to-understand report. Worried about bullies? Concerned that your teens' friends and peers are posting inappropriate materials online? MyChild searches every corner of the Internet for traces of your kids. If you want to help your teen manage their online reputation, but have felt powerless to do so, ReputationDefender is your answer!

Sue Scheff: Help ReputationDefender Support Nikki

When a family loses a child, I can’t even imagine the pain they endure. How they wake up the next day, how they feel, what they feel and how they go on with life. When a family loses a child in a tragic accident it seems it could only compound all the feelings of loss.

On October 31, 2006 the Catsouras family experienced the nightmare every parent fears - losing a teen in a tragic automobile accident.

The accident was the beginning of an emotional roller coaster. If you haven’t heard about this story, it is time to take a moment and help make a difference. Nikki Catsouras, after having a horrific car accident was dead on impact, the scene was described as shocking as Nikki’s head was nearly decapitated.

Can you even imagine as a parent, learning of this? Can you imagine living through this? As a parent advocate and a parent of two young adults now, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what this family has gone through.

What follows next is nothing short of evil, in my opinion. Shortly after Nikki was buried, her parents and sisters still in mourning, the Internet creeped into their lives in the most heinous way. Photo’s of Nikki’s crime scene were posted online! Yes, their daughter’s body, or what was left of it, was going viral! Where is justice? Who in God’s name would do this?

Please take a moment to read “A Tribute to Nikki Catsouras” and sign the petition to help create reasonable protection for personal privacy on the Internet.

Sue Scheff: What is ReputationDefender?

ReputationDefender was created in 2006 to defend your good name on the Internet. Today, ReputationDefender has grown to be the world's first comprehensive online reputation management and privacy company. We're the most experienced and most technologically innovative company of our kind. With customers in over 35 countries, ReputationDefender is proud to serve a global customer base throughout the world's largest community - the Internet.

Our goal is straightforward:

To SEARCH out all information about you and your family throughout the Internet and present it to you in a clear, easy-to-understand fashion

To provide DESTROY assistance, helping to remove, at your request, inaccurate, inappropriate, hurtful, and slanderous information about you and your family using our proprietary in-house methodology. This same mission extends to your personally identifiable information, like name, address, and phone number.

To deliver CONTROL over how others are able to perceive you on the Internet

Learn more by visiting www.reputationdefender.com Check out MyChild and MyPrivacy to protect your family!

ReputationDefender Featured in the TorontoSun

Source: TorontoSun.com

Becoming web dead

Web content that sullies your reputation can be cleansed

By VIVIAN SONG, NATIONAL BUREAU


It was 3 a.m. when Lori Paris sleepwalked her way into work, ready to anchor the overnight shift at her local radio station.

As always, she went to log into her Facebook account looking for the company of virtual friends at a lonely hour, but was blocked, greeted instead by hostile "error" messages flashing on her screen.

"Then a co-worker who works down the hall ran down asking, 'What do you need help with?" Paris recalled.

While the real McCoy was sitting at her desk in a Toronto radio station, an imposter from England had hijacked Paris' Facebook profile and was pleading for help in her status message.

"Apparently, I was stuck in London and needed $500 to get home," Paris said.

"I had been robbed at gunpoint and had no money to get back."

For the next few days, Paris was fielding frantic phone calls from friends and family who were ready to fork over money.

"I didn't want anyone to get ripped off," she said.

Unlike stories of feckless users who post personal information on public profiles, Paris had restricted access to friends she approved.

She was likely the victim of a worldwide phishing attack earlier this year that used the same ruse of being stuck in London and struck a "small number of users," said Debbie Frost, a Facebook spokesman.

"We're reminding users to be very suspicious of anyone, even friends, who ask you over the Internet to send money."

But users overestimate the security levels of social networking sites and forget that they're for-profit businesses with crude security systems -- not banks, said Avner Levin, the director of the Privacy Institute at Toronto's Ryerson University.

Meanwhile, though identity thieves are creating multiple doppelgangers of people online, an opposite phenomenon has also been surfacing -- scrubbing oneself offline, or web dead.

Companies such as ReputationDefender will scour the Internet and remove unflattering material that could sully their client's online reputation. For example, when a grad student discovered a picture of her half-naked body posted by a bitter ex-boyfriend, she enlisted ReputationDefender's help. The company's strategy is surprisingly simple: They ask the site host politely. They're not a legal team, says founder Michael Fertik, but they've seldom had to resort to legal methods in the 10,000 removal requests made so far.

Not everything is erasable. Official records like court documents and news clippings are immune.

"People are alive to the fact that the web is not their enemy," Fertik said from California. "It's a fact of life and people want to have as much control over it as possible."

But what if you don't have an online profile or e-mail account, as is common among the computer illiterate? Don't be quick to congratulate yourself on preserving anonymity, experts say.

Because unbeknownst to you, you could be identified in a nephew's Facebook family picture.

"The world is changing with social media," Levin said. "People will have to play by a new set of rules. Very little is sacred or within our control anymore."

But that shouldn't mean we get little say in how our information is used, say experts at the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic in Ottawa.

"The big criticism of social networking sites is that the terms of use aren't clear," said acting director and lawyer David Fewer. "The benefits are clear, but the cost of engaging in the service is unknown."

Lawyers at the clinic filed a complaint against the networking giant, alleging Facebook's policies violate Canadian privacy law by failing to identify how it collects and uses personal information, and what they do with personal information after users deactivate their accounts.

The policy must be in plain language and refrain from legalese, Fewer said, and clearly spell out privacy settings to its client base, which is made up predominantly of young users.

"The claim that privacy policies take care of everything is an incredible abdication of responsibility," Fewer said.

Facebook officials, meanwhile, maintain the complaint is flawed because it overlooks the obvious: That the data is willingly shared by users.

"At Facebook, we ... believe (the controls) are entirely consistent with both the spirit and requirements of Canadian privacy law," Frost said.

But are we asking too much of a service that, at the end of the day, is a for-profit business and not a government institution?

"We need to be reminded that Facebook is a business and has to make money," Levin said. "There's a strong sense of entitlement to privacy in social media. It's part of a larger sense of entitlement from getting things for free on the Internet like movies, music and software."

When you sign up for a free service, you "choose" to volunteer personal information that's then shared with third-party advertisers -- there has to be an exchange, Levin said.

"People have unrealistic expectations that you can get the best of both worlds. In the real world, something has to give."

vivian.song@sunmedia.ca