31–40 of 160 posts
It's like the old days of Ironport. Ironport built a rack-mount spam filtering appliance for business. They also built a rack-mount spam-sending appliance for business. That blew their reputation.
I wonder if there are reputation protection companies that try a different strategy: for every user that requests their service, prop up thousands of fake identities with the user's name, but each with some inconsistent profile that are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the original user. So if someone search for a person, their search results would be flooded with garbage. Since it seems very difficult to try t…
Now do DuckDuckGo!
I can’t give specifics, I know someone who had to deal with “delete me” requests from these “privacy” companies. The privacy company would literally take your personal info (name, email), and _email it to every company they could think of_ asking the company to delete your account _even if you didn’t have one_.
But this is really a chicken-egg situation. How do you tell companies to delete your information without telling them what identifies your information? It's in these companies' interest to make this as difficult as possible, so a solution based on data hashes is highly unlikely to appear out of their good will alone. This requires strict regulation and high fines.
There's also the issue of proving ownership of the data requested for deletion. Even in the EU with the GDPR, which is arguably the most progressive data privacy regulation we have, companies routinely violate this by requesting even more personal information from the requester.
A not-so-secret dirty little secret is that many of the reputation management agencies also own many of the public records websites that publish mug shots, court records, and so on. When you hire them to remove that information from the internet it puts you into a cycle of being removed from one or two of their website and added to something else. You end up in a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Complete with month…
It’s racketeering
They control the supply (the sites with your info) and the demand (the sites you can go through to request it get taken down)
/s, obviously
You see this a lot these days (though I suppose it's just more visible now). Another example is people selling political t-shirts (many offensive or obnoxious) to both sides of a partisan divide.
It’s not quite comparable though - this is deliberately deceiving a market into acquiring a service they didn’t need, which is basically racketeering.
A not-so-secret dirty little secret is that many of the reputation management agencies also own many of the public records websites that publish mug shots, court records, and so on. When you hire them to remove that information from the internet it puts you into a cycle of being removed from one or two of their website and added to something else. You end up in a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Complete with month…
It’s racketeering
A not-so-secret dirty little secret is that many of the reputation management agencies also own many of the public records websites that publish mug shots, court records, and so on. When you hire them to remove that information from the internet it puts you into a cycle of being removed from one or two of their website and added to something else. You end up in a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Complete with month…
Pay and your problems magically go away. Proofpoint was consistently the only block hit.
You see this a lot these days (though I suppose it's just more visible now). Another example is people selling political t-shirts (many offensive or obnoxious) to both sides of a partisan divide.
In the US, I feel like I only see one side buying merchandise. Especially offensive and obnoxious merchandise.