Want to protect yourself from Google?  The Google Opt-Out Village could be the place for you!

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village

Here at Reputation.com, The Onion has a special place in our hearts.  They have an amazing ability to capture current events in perfect satire. The Google Opt-Out Village may be a thing of fiction, but your online privacy shouldn’t be! MyPrivacy, MyReputation and MyEdge are there to protect you!

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?

As we move into an increasingly digital world, the right to privacy has become one of the most highly politicized issues in government and industry. Can you ever be truly anonymous on the web? How much information can companies gather about potential consumers through the web? What would happen if a major social network like MySpace or Facebook were hacked? Because privacy laws can’t adapt as fast as technology can change, these kinds of questions are notoriously difficult to answer. Of course, that’s the reason people invented Think Tanks.

Known for their eclectic mix of industry insiders and academic researchers, Think Tanks play an important part in shaping policy on a variety of issues. While there are already a number of Think Tanks in Washington, D.C. dedicated to privacy, the relatively new Future of Privacy Forum (FPF), merits particular attention.

Established in November 2008, FPF is headed by Jules Polonetsky, the former Chief Privacy Officer of AOL, and Christopher Wolf, a partner at Washington D.C. law firm Proskauer Rose LLP. According to the organization’s official homepage, the FPF “advocates for privacy advances that promote transparency and user control in a manner that is practical for business to implement to ensure personal autonomy for all who seek to embrace the benefits of our digital society.”

While the FPF boilerplate sounds good, we especially like that “personal autonomy” bit; ars technica reports that the group’s corporate ties have made some anxious about their promises.

From the article:

The Q&A session, however, quickly turned from the private to the pecuniary, with some pointed questions about the organization’s funding. The Forum’s initial money has come primarily from AT&T, with which Wolf’s firm has longstanding ties. Several online commentators, such as Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy, have worried that the Forum will act as a handmaiden of business, helping it preempt or dilute privacy legislation. Wolf, after all, was formerly chair of the Hands Off the Internet Coalition, a self-described consumer advocacy group that has often been characterized as an astroturf organization—an industry front dedicated to opposing net neutrality legislation. Polonetsky sought to confront those suspicions head on, denying that the group was an attempt to forestall legislation through promotion of self-regulation.

Besides Wolf’s connection to AT&T, questions of the FPF’s role in the net neutrality debate also arose.

Another—and, it should be noted, inconsistent—theory advanced by Saul Hansell of The New York Times holds that this is part of an ongoing feud between AT&T and Google that has its roots in the net neutrality debate. In this account, the Forum’s rationale is to level the playing field, ensuring that companies like Google don’t enjoy a competitive advantage in their ability to target advertising to consumers by using their personal data at the application level, something that ISPs are prevented from exploiting directly.

One of Google’s privacy attorneys has been invited to sit on the Forum’s advisory board, which may cast doubt on this suggestion. That invitee, however, hasn’t yet accepted or rejected the offer, which may signal that the search giant has suspicions of its own on this front.

Empowering individuals to use the Internet responsibly and pro-actively goes to the very core of Reputation.com, and any government agency or Think Tank that works toward that goal is a potential privacy advocate. The Future of Privacy Forum is certainly something that we’ll be keeping our eyes on here at the Reputation.com Blog.

According to that glorious repository of information, Wikipedia, entrepreneur Phillipe Kahn became the first man to demonstrate the practical use of a camera phone when he snapped a picture of his newborn daughter and sent it to 2000 friends and family. That was all the way back in 1997. Now, 12 years later, cellphones with camera functions are the standard. In fact, some ultra fancy phones, like the ever-popular Apple iPhone, boast cameras that can snap pictures with 2 megapixels of quality.

Of course, like with any new technology, there are certain trade offs. With the prevalence of cell phone cameras, it has become much easier for people to take and share pictures instantly. In some cases this has helped lead to justice, such as the recent arrest of an Oakland BART police officer for the killing of an unarmed man. Unfortunately, it has also led to an increase in good-old fashioned virtual voyeurism. One of the main places where this kind of camera phone use occurs is on the subway. Michael Daly discussed the issue in a recent editorial for the New York Daily News.

Quoting from the article:

You do not need to be a celebrity to have embarrassing images of you flashed before the public.

Yawn, doze, pass out, smooch, weep on the subway and you risk one of these pauper-azzis posting your picture on a site such as Flickr.

A woman who sat despondent on a train with her face in her hands appears in a photo captioned “The Saddest Girl.”

“Nice shot,” reads a comment.

Women who fill out their jeans risk appearing along with captions such as “fat bimbo a–” and “big a–.” A pair of youngsters appears with the caption: “Two kids from my neighborhood … I’ve watched them grow into very unhappy fat kids.”

“Killer capture,” applauds a poster.

One sorry soul was snapped while suffering a lapse in personal hygiene.

“Nose Picker,” reads the caption.

Another nose picker appears with a comment reading: “Eeeew!”

[SNIP]

There are also those whose pictures have artistic value. This underground aesthetic dates to the time of the Great Depression, when the renowned photographer Walker Evans rode the subway with a hidden camera poking from between the buttons of his overcoat.

“The guard is down and the mask is off,” he once said. “Even more than in lone bedrooms [where there are mirrors], people’s faces are in naked repose down in the subway.”

The reason for the underground “naked repose” is the psychic privacy we grant each other aboard the subway. We recognize we are trapped together with greatly reduced expectation of private space. We therefore allow another sort of distance, which joins with anonymity to accord a kind of solitude even when people are pressed in all around you.

We’ve written about the dangers of unprofessional Facebook and MySpace profiles previously, but the issue keeps coming up. A recent article from the Treasure Coast Palm details a survey of 320 college admissions officers conducted by Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions.  According to the survey, admitted to using the Internet to help make decisions on potential applicants. Of those who used the Internet, 38% said that their findings negatively affected their impressions of candidates.

Whether you’re applying for a job, applying to school, or even going out on a blind date; owning your Google search results is key to finding success. Merely setting your profile to private is not a guarantee of protection in the Internet age, which means constant vigilance in monitoring your online reputation is a must.