M.P. McQueen has this interesting article on bloggers, media insurance, and civil lawsuits in the Wall Street Journal.  Shout-out to the Berkman Center at HLS, too.

Jennifer Leggio, a social media and online reputation expert at ZDNet, recently had her twitter account mimicked in an aggressive act of personal brand impersonation. She eventually resolved the issue, but in talking with her colleagues, she found out that anyone is at risk for personal brand attacks online:

I know I’m not alone. Chris Brogan told me this morning that this has happened to him a handful of times. But it’s not just people with large Twitter or social networking followings who need to be careful about character assassination via the Web — it’s anyone online. We all have something to lose.

Later, Leggio talks to Owen Tripp, COO of Reputation.com and gets some expert insight on protecting her personal brand online. She even signs up for MyReputation to better protect her online identity.

I wrote last year about a great company called Reputation.com, a personal reputation and privacy protection service. I reached out to co-founder and executive vice president Owen Tripp again today about this situation, and ask some questions that might help folks better protect their brands or their companies’ brands.

“The best protection is prevention or prophylaxis.  Claim your LinkedIN, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace identities before somebody else does it for you and starts to damage your reputation. By establishing accurate information on these key domains you will prevent others from hijacking them from you,” Tripp said. “Also, you need to stay in control of your online brand by monitoring proactively.  You will limit the damage of brand hijacking if you quick recognize that you are under attack.  In my experience, too few people know how to properly set up the personal searches they need to be able to run in order to fully control their identity.”

When I asked Tripp specifically about my situation, or monitoring my brand, he gave me some pretty good insight into how they do what they do:

“Our MyReputation search runs the equivalent of thousands of Google Alerts.  For example, we wouldn’t just scan for ‘Jennifer Leggio’ but ‘ J Leggio’ or ‘Jennifer ZDNet’ or ‘mediaphtyr’, etc. And then we’ll extract additional clues from the content we find (for example, maybe we learn the name of a spouse and then add then on to the cluster of recursive searches we are running for you each month),” Tripp said. “Finally, we make sure we go deeper, seeking mentions of your name and personal details on Web sites that Google can’t reach.  For example, we actively search over 40 social networks, most of which are not indexed by the search engines.”

After this experience, I’m putting my money where my mouth is and signing up for the MyReputation service.

Reputation.com is committed to protecting privacy and identity online and encourages all online users to monitor and protect their digital reputation. Special thanks to Ms. Leggio for bringing this issue to her own security conscious following.

According to Wikipedia, the phrase “information wants to be free” is an “expression that has come to be the unofficial motto of the free content movement.”  Much of what we do at Reputation.com has to do with this concept. Do we as a society and as individuals really want every type of information to be visible to anyone, at any time? Do we want our medical history, phone numbers, old addresses and private photos to be  as readily accessible as, say, who played third base for the Red Sox in 1912? (The answer to this question is found below).

I recently read a couple of books that, specifically speaking in one case and broadly speaking in another, illustrate the narrative of information’s wanting to be free (in the sense of freely available), and the potentially history-altering or life-changing consequences that may arrive when it is.

The Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls by Hershel Shanks tells the story of the battle to wrest access over the Scrolls, discovered in the early 1950s, from an exclusionary group of scholars who more or less refused to publish or grant access to them for decades.  It also offers a precis of the potential religious and historical significance the scrolls, including possible redefinition of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism.  Even though the Scrolls represented the most significant biblical archaeological find of the 20th century, the scholars who worked on deciphering them declined to publish their findings or even more than very narrowly disseminate facsimiles of the primary materials for a startlingly long time.  It was not till Shanks and a handful of others forced the hands of the scholars that the world finally was able to see the scrolls for themselves.  Now, thanks to their good efforts and the power of the Internet, together with the work of places like the Library of Congress, we can all see detailed images of the scrolls themselves, at any time, wherever we are in the world.

The publication of the primary material of scrolls has generated a massive bibliography and new fields of scholarship (including one called Qumran Studies, after the location of the scrolls’ discovery).  In this case, information really did want to be free, and it took the hard work of a dedicated group of people to make it free.

Still, it seems, there are persistent and, according to Shanks, apparently plausible rumors of other intact Dead Sea Scrolls that are circulating in private hands around the world.  The information bound up in these items, should they exist, needs to be set free through their publication, so that a more complete picture of this historical time can continue to be assembled.  Even more scrolls are expected to be lurking in caves around Qumran the entrances to which have been covered up by earthquake over the millennia.

Gunther Grass’s memoir Peeling the Onion gets at the theme of information freedom differently.  Grass, a Nobel prize winning German author, has been writing for more than half a century, during which time he has been an outspoken literary and activist left-of-center critic of Germany’s Nazi past, of its collective guilt, and of insufficient transparency and penance among the German people for their participation in the Holocaust and in the other crimes of the Third Reich.  In the mid-1980s, he attacked President Reagan and Chancellor Kohl for visiting a cemetery than included Waffen graves.  He was often described as–and seems to have been comfortable with the appellation–one of Germany’s chief moral authorities.

However, in 2006, it was revealed that Grass had himself been a member of the Waffen-SS.  He joined when he was 17.  Spiegel Online confirmed the basic facts of this story through the publication of several historical records.  Grass published Peeling the Onion that year.  While it purports to be a memoir of his life, or at least the first few decades of it, more or less up to the time he started writing The Tin Drum, one can’t help but get the feeling that he wrote it as an apologia pro sua Waffen vita.  In one long stretch of the book–the longest and most detailed piece of it, at least as my memory serves me as I write this–he makes himself out to be a coward (but only just) in World War II.  He runs away, he doesn’t know how to use a gun, he fears for his life, he soils himself, he spends time in a POW camp, etc..  It comes across, after all the nouns and verbs, as an attempt to explain away the significance of his fighting for the Reich and his subsequent decades of hiding it.  Was he really a Nazi?  This seems very unlikely.  But it did seem to me that, burdened by his secret and the gap between his public persona and his private history, and perhaps also worried that the information about his past would eventually want to be free, Grass set out to cast it in the most luminous and best-shaped bronze he could.

As a book, Peeling the Onion is also a powerful literary biography of a man who must be one of the most highly literate writers now living.  Grass gives us the source material from his life experiences of some of his brightly vivid major and minor characters.  I am guessing that the memoir will be used as some sort of key to unlock his novels and plays by Grass scholars for many years to come.  I also doubt that Grass’s past will obliterate entirely my own view of his writing (The Meeting at Telgte is outstanding). But in the end, I don’t think I will cherish this memoir.

Two books about information that, we might say, should be free.

(The answer to the question who played third base for Red Sox in 1912 is Larry Gardner. This is the kind of obscure piece of information that becomes immediately accessible on the Internet, through a single search on a major search engine.  I’ll be revisiting what we might call the Larry Gardner Theory of the Internet in future writings).

A little while back, we wrote about Face.com’s newly released Photo Finder application for Facebook. The application, which uses facial recognition software to identify faces in untagged photos and tag them, created somewhat of a stir among privacy advocates. How would this application affect individuals who want to keep their images untagged? Would Facebook’s natural privacy settings be enough to help prevent private photos from being leaked?

Today, just over one month after Photo Finder was released, Mashable has published a post exploring some of these issues, as well as the considerable reach of the application.

From the post:

One month ago, Face.com released the private alpha of their Photo Finder Facebook Application. It’s goal is to help tag photos of you and your friends that are untagged by utilizing facial recognition technology. And while only a few thousand alpha testers have the Facebook () app installed, it has tagged over 700,000 faces across 400 million photos. No matter how you slice it, that’s an amazing amount of photos that this app has sifted through. Just as important, it’s eerily accurate at connecting faces to names.

[SNIP]

It’s impressive how scalable Photo Finder has been thus far. It’s tagging Facebook photos faster than 9,000 images a minute and rising. When Face.com is finally released to the general public, it’s likely that it would be able to sift through almost all of Facebook’s 15 billion+ photos.

Facial recognition, of course, isn’t a new technology – Apple’s iPhoto has it and there is Polar Rose, which provides facial recognition on Flickr (). Face.com seems to have a far more ambitious goal though: to complete the picture social graph. No person left untagged, no photo left by in digital space, and every person in every picture tagged and sorted.

Since this is going through public photos only, the privacy issue isn’t as prevalent, though we’re sure concerns will be raised. However, Photo Finder’s phenomenal speed is a reminder that anything you or your friends put on the Internet is public domain and will probably be found one way or another.

It would be something of a pity if the precise contours of the 9th Circuit Yahoo case up in Oregon actually prompted websites to monitor and clean themselves up LESS than they currently do.  We can propose a Simple Formula for Bad Judicial Lawmaking:
(BO) Bad outcome + (BL) bad law + (BI) bad incentives = Worse Behavior (WB).
And who in the world would want more WB?