Reputation In the Future Is A Scary Thing….

We are all in this together! Knowing that as you read this, vast amounts of digital records are being developed on every individual, down to the websites you visit and the links you click on. In fact, a growing underground economy of archives and data-storage sites that quietly records trillions of online activities, are just waiting for someone to figure out a way to leverage this private data. Predictive analytics can compare all your geo activity and clicks and social shares and likes to billions of people and their data, now “the powers that be” know you better than you know yourself. This data is private but nobody protects it. There are no laws that make it private. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and you ISP have no right to resell it, but what about every hop on the web that can siphon this data? What about everything you volunteer to the world. You may have already pured it, but your data is already stored in many place and several sites have found ways to make use of it already. Even if you are not often on the web, you are still a target, maybe even more so. Spokeo.com mines government records and address databases and makes them available on the web. Because you do not have a presence on the web, these results will take over and give prominence to information that may define you as a result of no other information being prominently avilable.Then there is Klout, which will analyze your social media to determine a score on how much influence you currently have. The growth of all of these reputation scoring sites underscores the importance of algorithms which decide for society who each one of us are. This is very “big brother” and often leaves people scared. most of my students do not even want to contemplate the future in these terms. They are groomed to accept this way of life, being boxed in by smart machines does not faze them, but consequences seem intolerable.

Online Reputation Managers

This reputation scoring becomes our reputation, because they can accurately predict our character. It is also because people believe what they read on the web. So the best thing to do is to hire and online reputation manager to help you navigate all this reputation scoring and use these algorithms for your benefit, to improve and lift your online reputation.

Take charge of your reputation by carefully curating the information on the Internet. Curating means avoiding the negative and promoting the positive or even neutral. It is time you get help and understand the information gap and try to see how it may be filled by others, perhaps in a way to hurt your reputation.