Today’s New York Times runs a story about the power of databases in shaping reputation. The story focuses on expunged criminal records but it could just as well been about the impact of identity theft on credit histories. In either case, facts adverse to one’s reputation seem to take a life of its own and persist long after the event, lying dormant until surfacing at a vital juncture in the identity holder’s life. In the wake of the job or credit denial, the applicant must then grapple with the databases to mend her reputation.

The internet version of this story is of the teenager who gets denied by Princeton because of her MySpace profile or the employee who gets canned for her personal blog entries or dismissed by a potential lover because of stupid forum postings. Unlike proprietary credit or criminal databases, the reputation keeper here is Google--and its lesser brethern—that save and index everything they come across on the open internet.

The credit agencies, happy to sell arms to all sides, provide proactive solutions to individuals like real time credit monitoring services. On the internet, techdirt offers reputation monitoring to corporations. What services exist for individual reputation on the internet?

ReputationDefender.com uncloaked recently and quietly in beta to fill just that void. CEO Michael Fertik leads a startup team with distinguished legal and public policy backgrounds that you’d expect to see on the roster of a Beltway think tank or law firm. Filling out the executive team are CTO Brian Kelley, Director of Operations Ross Chanin and Directory of Privacy Research David Thompson. Fertik co-founded TruExchange, and many of those same people are involved in this new venture. The company is based in Louisville, Kentucky.

Their two major products involve online reputation. ReputationDefender will monitor

• Social networks (MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Bebo, and more);
• Professional review websites;
• Blogs;
• Online news sources;
• Photograph, video, and audio sharing sites (Flickr, YouTube, etc.); and,
• Millions of additional sites on the "open Internet."

and send the subscriber a monthly update.

Finding what you wrote about yourself is easy. Finding out what others wrote might be more of a challenge. I’d be curious to see how they monitor reputation on MySpace. Google’s search engine indexes just a fraction of the MySpace pages and apparently none of the blogs or forums. MySpace’s own index is worthless. Perhaps their proprietary spider will index the subscriber’s relationship tree. The monitoring doesn’t have find every bit of info about you, just as much as what a reasonably determined investigator can unearth, say an admissions officer in twenty minutes of poking around.

When something adverse is found, their team of advocates will act on your behalf to have that information removed:

Next, we DESTROY. You can select any content from your report that you don't like. This is where we go to work for you.

Our trained and expert online reputation advocates use an array of proprietary techniques developed in-house to correct and/or completely remove the selected unwanted content from the web. This is an arduous and labor-intensive task, but we take the job seriously so you can sleep better at night. We will always and only be in YOUR corner.

This is where an individual subscriber can leverage institutional conduits and clout.

The service targeted to individuals as MyReputation and to parents as MyChild. A 6-month plan starts at $15.95/month.

A related service to protect the privacy of personal information called MyPrivacy is in the works.

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