Over the weekend, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington predicted that, someday soon, reputation online would be a dead issue. In essence, Arrington argued that the Internet will soon become so full of review websites and other forums for anonymous speech that it would become unnecessary for people to work on managing their reputations because society as a whole will be forced to learn how to distinguish the fake from the real.

It was a bold prediction, and one that prompted intense discussion at TechCrunch (as well as a nuanced response from Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik here on our blog), but what was it that prompted Arrington to make his prediction in the first place? A new start-up profiled at TechCrunch today, called Unvarnished.

Unvarnished is described in the TechCrunch article as “Yelp for LinkedIn.” In other words, like Yelp, users can leave anonymous reviews, with the difference being that instead of reviewing businesses, these reviews are meant to establish a person’s professional credibility (like LinkedIn). The notion that Unvarnished is for “professionals” is carried through in the website’s messaging. For instance, on Unvarnished’s beta homepage, users are greeted with the message, “Unvarnished is an online resource for building, managing, and researching professional reputation.”

Interestingly, however, while Unvarnished purports to be a tool for building a professional reputation, the website seems to offer a very convenient method by which users can anonymously inflict intentional damage on one another with little regard for factual accuracy. In a comment on TechCrunch’s most recent post, Unvarnished co-founder Pete Kazanjy addressed some of the concerns about his company, saying,

“We need to be clear about what we mean when we say “anonymous” here, in that this can be sensitive topic. To encourage candor, and allow review authors to contribute honest, balanced reviews without fear of repurcussion, Unvarnished obscures the identity of reviewer authors–a review author’s identity will never be outwardly tied to a review they have been submitted. Furthermore, Unvarnished does not outwardly tie together multiple reviews submitted by the same user, in order to prevent the reverse-engineering of an author’s identity.

However, reviewers are not anonymous to the Unvarnished backend systems–all reviews submitted by a given user are tied together in our systems such that better reviewers can be rewarded for their strong reviews, and reviewers who participate in bad behavior can be censured across all of their reviews.

Ultimately, reviewers do have identity on the site, and reputation and authority associated with that identity. Unvarnished wants reviewers to invest in that identity and associated authority, by rewarding strong reviewers by making all their reviews more authoritative, and by punishing badly behaved reviewers by demoting or, in egregious cases, removing their reviews–including their reviews that were submitted in good faith. If a reviewer is found to have violated Unvarnished Community Guidelines or Terms of Service, repurcussions will extend across all reviews authored by that user.”

In a way, Unvarnished isn’t anything new. A number of companies have come up in recent years offering users the opportunity to leave anonymous reviews about people. One example focused on the venture capital industry is TheFunded.com, though there have been other more generally focused websites as well. While Unvarnished differentiates itself somewhat through its professional focus, given the number of people review websites that have come before it, there is no guarantee that the company will take off.

Truthfully, however, whether Unvarnished becomes a major force in the world of social media isn’t important. The thing that individuals must consider is how they will combat negative reviews if they should come up. As Michael Fertik discussed in an interview with ABC News last year, “Normally, no good comes from these [people review] sites. They become places of abuse.” Even if Unvarnished takes major steps to prevent fraud, and we commend Mr. Kazenjy for some of the things that he and his team have already put in place, the truth is that at least some people’s reputations will be unfairly damaged.

When that happens, the individuals who have invested time in monitoring and proactively building a strong online presence will be the ones who can weather the storm. To this end, we encourage anyone who is interesting in protecting their good name online to give us a call today at 877-720-6488 and talk with a representative about our unique suite of reputation management and Internet privacy products.