Around the world, politicians, lawyers, and citizens are seeking solutions to the problem of the preservation of our e-identity control in a digital world that never forgets. Players like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Google… try to find solutions and new actors are a niche market.
Switzerland insurance company comes even to engage on this niche offering in partnership with Reputation Squad the first offer of insurance e-reputation (72% of Internet users cannot remove the content disseminated their knowledge on the web). For €9.90 / month are you guaranteed protection for defamation on the internet, publication of private consent data or identity theft.
History
In France, Alex Türk, President of the National Commission for computing and liberties, has called for the recognition of a “constitutional right to oblivion”. In Argentina, journalists Alejandro Tortolini and Enrique Quagliano have launched an operation to “reinvent forgetting on the Internet” by exploring different ways political and technological to remove data. In February, the European Union has contributed to the funding of a campaign entitled “Think B4 U post!” (Think before you post!), which encourages young people to take into account the “potential impact” of the publication of photos of them or their friends. The United States, a group of technologists, lawyers and cyberspécialistes explores ways to recreate the possibility of digital oblivion.
Against Wikipedia, birth of ReputationDefender
Self-governing communities such as Wikipedia – or systems with active algorithms such as Google – often leave people feeling to be presented in a false light and permanently soiled. For many people, there are already concrete solutions: see a society like Reputation Defender, which is committed to enhance your virtual image. Reputation Defender was founded by Michael Fertik, a graduate of Harvard law concerned with the idea that young people can see their reputation forever tainted by errors of youth Michael Fertik.
Reputation Defender has customers in more than 100 countries. For a fee, business control your reputation online by contacting the sites one by one, asking them to remove the offending articles. These services are charged between $ 10 per month and $ 1,000 per year; for difficult cases, the price can reach tens of thousands of dollars. “We hear employers seeking candidates to open before them their Facebook page at job interviews, says Fertik.” Some of our customers are parents whose children referred to them on the Internet. »
The research of images on the Internet will soon involve social networks, like Spokeo aggregators or Pipl today, which bring together all sorts of data on the Web – political contributions, blogs, videos, comments, lists of property real estate and photo albums. More and more, these aggregators hiérarchiseront reputations public and private, such as the new site Kujhac (“without varnish”), this market of reputation where you can write anonymous articles on anyone. In the world of Web 3.0, predicted Fertik, people will be considered, evaluated and rated in service not their solvency, but their serious as good parents, good boyfriends, good staff, good babysitters or good insured.
Technical solutions are the most promising
Anticipating these new challenges, some lawyers have begun to imagine new laws allowing individuals to correct these judgments that could in the future govern their personal relationships and professional, or escape. It can also respond to attacks on his reputation by bringing a common law trial. The number of “Twittergations”, these trials to coerce websites to remove false or libellous information has already significantly increased. Also have some jurists proposed legislation requiring websites to remove false or defamatory information.
In his book, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger uses the new Borges Funes (his hero has lost any right to oblivion) to illustrate the consequences of the imposition of our digital past. He suggested a technical solution: the imitation of human forgetting by giving data of expiry dates. He imagines a world where storage devices could be programmed to delete blog notes, photos or other information who have reached their expiration date, and it suggests that users are encouraged to select this date before any backup of file. It is not a utopia because
In September 2008, Google decided to fall into anonymity all research conducted for more than nine months.
On a small scale, the TigerText application allows SMS senders to award a limited period ranging from one minute to thirty days, beyond which the message disappears from the servers of the company hosting it and thus phones of the sender and the recipient.
Researchers at the University of Washington are developing a technology called Vanish, which program the “self-destruction” of the electronic data after some time. Rather than rely on Google, Facebook or Hotmail to delete data stored “in the cloud” – in other words, on their respective servers-, Vanish encrypts the data and then “destroyed” the encryption key. To read, your computer must restore the key from different parts, but these “erode” or “rust” in time and, beyond a certain stage, the document becomes unreadable. By Tadayoshi Kohno, one of its designers, Vanish can provide expiration dates for email but for any data stored in the cloud, including photos, text, or any other item posted on Facebook, Google or on a blog.
The battle of the digital identity: new services
Facebook is already well established on this niche with its Facebook Connect, but remains very low in privacy management.
AOL recently bought About.me, a simple service to create personal pages to focus your presence online.
Google is also engaged in this segment for a long time and for his catch on the grip of social grahe Facebook accèlère désiormais innovations with the promotion of the accounts and profiles: Google Promotes Google Accounts, and Me, Myself and I: Helping to manage your identity on the web.
