Reputation Armor

Reputation Armor knows good name can be worth millions, and we all know by now what happens when a first-class name gets into bad trouble. Tiger Woods is only one example of how imperative your reputation is, and how effortless it is to damage it.

The online world has fashioned a new area of law in this age of Web 2.0. It’s called Online Reputation Management Law, as reputation armor sees it, it hovers right around the law of defamation, freedom of speech, privacy law, copyright law, and trademark law. It also involves the non-legal (but equally as important) fields of public relations and crisis management. Many of the legal issues in this area involve Facebook, which has over 350,000,000 users, (including about 90% of all the middle school and secondary school students you and your colleagues teach every day. You might be a Facebook user as well.)

If someone says or publishes something about another person that is untrue, not otherwise privileged, and this damages the other person’s reputation, this may well amount to defamation and legal consequences may follow. “online” publication of defamatory statements on Facebook, Twitter, or on blogs is still publication. Reputation Armor asks this question, what if the damaged reputation is self-inflicted? Although there are things that older adults may share with others in more private ways, there has never been a generation so willing to share their innermost feelings, their outrageous opinions and their inappropriate photographs than the under-25 age group who make up the mainstay of Facebook. Reputation armor hears stories about the things 15- to 18-year-olds post on Facebook. Many of these people don’t seem to understand how the comments and photos they post can be publicly accessible, profoundly inappropriate, and, in the future, career-limiting.

Reputation Armor continuously tells clients: “Clean up your Social Networking Sites”

So here are a few legal and practical things that Reputation Armor thinks might interest you.

Reputation Armor Tips and Thoughts

1. Social networking sites can retain cached archives of everything everyone posts, even if it’s deleted 60 seconds after being posted.

2. Any posting can be saved to another’s computer by an easy screen shot. And any photograph on can be dragged to another’s desktop and circulated to others by e-mail, even though it may have been removed from the original poster’s page. Digital pictures pulled can be Photoshopped and otherwise manipulated in very bad ways.

3. Reputation Armor has noted before that Insurance company investigators frequently check pages of those they are investigating, sometimes posing as an old high school friends, or friends of friends so they can surreptitiously see the page and confirm or deny the claim4. Social Networking pages can be evidence and can be the subject of cross examination, even though a defendant had made his page as private as possible.

4. A court in New York City forced Google (as owner of a particular blogging website), to disclose the name of an anonymous blogger who arguably defamed a prominent model; the moral of the story being that no one is anonymous anymore. The defamed can always find the defamer.

5. Tweets on Twitter are searchable on Google, (so that tweets about how much an employee hates his/her boss can be found by that math teacher). Of course we don’t have that problem at Reputation Armor (because out boss is awesome….haha)

6. Users should limit the number of friends on such sites to real friends. If someone has 800 friends, one of them may be an insurance investigator, and another could be someone far, far worse.

7. This is actually viewed by reputation armor as the most important aspect: Privacy Privacy Privacy. Users should adjust their privacy settings so that only friends (and not “everyone”) can see what they have posted. And never allow “friends of friends” access. Although Facebook changed its privacy settings in December 2009, Reputation Armor have observed reports that show that 70% of users still have their settings set to “everyone can see everything,” possibly because they don’t know how the privacy settings work. And of course, Google sees it all.

8. Parents might want to monitor the social networking activities of their teens, but teens (understandably) don’t want to allow parent access as “friends.” Reputation Armor recommends a “designated driver”; a young adult the teen and the parent both trust, and who won’t contact parents about questionable postings or photos (but will call up the teen).

9. Finally, you shouldn’t post pictures or comments you wouldn’t want your mother, grandmother, or future employer to see, because one day soon, they will.