|
Web can ruin reputation with stroke
of a key May 6, 2007
By Anna Badkhen
 The
first postings appeared soon after Sue Scheff, who runs a Web-based
referral service for parents with troubled teenagers, advised a
woman from Louisiana to withdraw her twin sons from a boarding
school in 2002.
Scheff is "a con artist," "a crook"
and "a fraud," according to the messages, which peppered blogs and
Internet forums for parents of troubled teens.
Soon, calls to Scheff's Parents
Universal Resource Experts dropped by half, said Scheff, 45, who
lives in Weston, Fla. "People would say: 'You know, I just read this
about you online. How do I know I can trust you?' "
Scheff, whose 6-year-old service
usually draws a lot of traffic, is a victim of an emerging
phenomenon: online smear campaigns, which can wreak havoc in the
victims' professional and business lives at the touch of a few
keystrokes.
"It is happening ... on more or
less every Web site where people can create content," said Michael
Fertik, a co-founder of ReputationDefender, a Palo Alto-based group
that helps clients remove damaging content from the Internet. "From
underage people, to university people, to graduate school people, to
older people, to people who are being targeted by exes, to people
who are being targeted by ex-business partners, colleagues at work."
Millions of Americans use Internet
search engines and social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook
to learn more about prospective dates, neighbors and colleagues. One
in 4 hiring managers use online search engines like Google to screen
job candidates, a survey by the CareerBuilder job search engine
showed last fall. The Internet has become a 21st century credit
report service.
The catch: Anyone can post any
information about anyone, however false, on any one of the thousands
of Internet sites with modifiable content. Once posted, defamatory
information can be stored on the Web forever, accessible to anyone
via a simple search.
"You would Google my name, and what
would come up was 'beware of Sue Scheff,' " said Scheff, 45, who
eventually won an $11.3 million defamation lawsuit last fall against
the mother from Louisiana, Carey Bock, the author of most of the
original postings accusing Scheff of fraud that started appearing in
2003. "It was ugly. It was horrible."
Bock, 49, told The Chronicle last
week that she will appeal the decision, handed down by a jury in
Florida's Broward County Circuit Court. "I don't think I've done
anything wrong," she said.
"There have always been cases of
people speaking their minds without thinking of ramifications," and
defamatory postings are "simply a new expression of that," said
Rebecca Jeschke, spokeswoman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
a San Francisco nonprofit legal organization that advocates digital
rights and free speech.
In contrast to ReputationDefender,
she said, the foundation counsels many people "who are being accused
of defamation, who say what they said was an opinion."
Because it is often hard to tell
fiction from fact, employers sometimes unwittingly allow falsehoods
posted on the Internet to inform their decisions about prospective
employees, said Larry Ponemon, president and founder of the
Michigan-based Ponemon Institute, which specializes in privacy
research.
"Cyber-slamming is a recent
phenomenon (that is) going to create an entire area of legal issues
for people who were denied potential employment because someone
decided to publish slanderous information on them," Ponemon said.
A February survey by the institute
showed that roughly one-third of Internet searches by hiring
managers yielded content that became the basis for denying jobs to
the candidates.
That's what one Yale law student
believes happened to her earlier this year when none of the 16 law
firms to which she had applied for a summer job made her an offer.
The student, who did not want her name used because she feared
retribution online, has published articles in legal journals and
says she has "great grades."
She was one of several female Yale
law students singled out by anonymous contributors to a popular law
school message board on AutoAdmit.com, a discussion forum for law
students.
The postings contain derogatory
references to her mental capacity and sexual activity, claim she had
sexually transmitted diseases, and threaten sexual violence against
her.
The woman said the law firm
representatives who had interviewed her must have seen these
comments. She said the representatives had asked her for personal
information that she had not included in her resume, but which
appears alongside the AutoAdmit.com postings when her name is
searched on Google.
"That's really unprecedented; most
students get multiple job offers. I have been applying in an area I
have an immense expertise in. I knew my stuff," said the student,
who said she does not know who wrote the anonymous postings.
Law firms are reluctant to hire
students whose names are associated with anything scandalous, said
another Yale law student. An AutoAdmit.com chat last winter
discussed the student's breasts and posted her photographs.
"They don't want their clients to
be able to Google their attorney's names and see this," she
explained.
The women had asked Jarret Cohen,
the owner of AutoAdmit.com, to remove the discussions, but he had
refused.
"It's a slippery slope once you
start deciding what is and what isn't allowed to be said," Cohen, a
23-year-old insurance broker in Pennsylvania, wrote in an e-mail to
The Chronicle. He acknowledged that violations of privacy on
discussion boards are "part of a growing social problem on the
Internet."
Harold Koh, dean of Yale Law
School, denounced the assertions on AutoAdmit.com as "false and
hurtful" in an open letter to the law school students. "These
malicious attacks, as well as racist, sexist and homophobic speech,
have no place in the Yale Law School community," Koh wrote.
AutoAdmit.com is not affiliated with Yale.
Under current law, a court cannot
oblige the owner of a site hosting defamatory postings to remove the
offensive content, said Fertik, whose company has hundreds of
clients across 17 countries.
ReputationDefender (www .reputationdefender.com),
which was founded last fall, charges $29.95 to try to remove each
item from the Internet, and a monthly fee of $9.95 to continue to
monitor postings about an existing client.
Sporadic attempts to rein in
defamatory content have been unsuccessful so far. Last month,
bloggers denounced as censorship a call to ban anonymous comments
and delete abusive posts. The proposal by Tim O'Reilly, a book
publisher and chief of O'Reilly Media Inc., came after Kathy Sierra,
a Colorado blogger, received anonymous death threats and was
frightened into canceling her appearance at O'Reilly's conference in
San Diego.
Damaging postings don't always come
from ill-wishers. Individuals post provocative information or
pictures of themselves, only to learn later that employers see these
posts as reason not to hire them, said Jennifer Sullivan, a
spokeswoman for CareerBuilder.
Applicants typically get in
trouble, she said, by posting "information or photos that show them
drinking or using drugs or being irresponsible," Sullivan said.
"The Internet is a big tattooing
machine that makes you relive momentary mistakes and lapses in
judgment that we all make," said Fertik, who said ReputationDefender
often helps people remove items they had posted on the Internet
about themselves.
Still, it hurts far more when such
postings appear without the knowledge of their subjects -- as
happened to Danté Roberson, a jazz and hip-hop drummer from Oakland.
When an anonymous posting on MySpace.com in January accused him of
being a thief, Roberson hired ReputationDefender, which persuaded
the owner of the specific MySpace.com page to remove the offending
post that Roberson said could have cost him numerous gigs.
"Who wants to have all that kind of
mess in their camp?" said Roberson, who makes a living touring with
bands. "You are trying to run a clean and sober camp and all of a
sudden this (appears). Who wants to have this dirtiness on them?"
E-mail Anna Badkhen at abadkhen@sfchronicle.com.
|
