After Years of Telling All, 20-Somethings Start to Clam Up

Reputations at Risk

Not scoring a job offer because of a too revealing Facebook or MySpace profile is bad. But the consequences of unintended eyes clicking on personal photos or information can be far worse, as a young woman at a top law school found out when someone posted her Facebook pictures on a law school student's message board.

"There were a bunch of pictures of me that somebody posted from my Facebook page saying 'Check out this girl at this law school,' said the student, who asked that her name and identifying details be withheld.

"They were saying really damaging things about me," she continued. "Men talking about what they'd like to do to me sexually ... Even stupid things how ugly my hair looks when it's curly. They scrutinized me on every level and it's been really damaging for my self-esteem."

The student asserted her pictures were not scandalous or revealing, and that the security settings of her Facebook profile allowed only people she approved as friends to see her pictures.

Desperate to get her photos removed from the forum and the other sites that had posted them, she contacted ReputationDefender, a self-proclaimed PR firm for the average person.

"Our motto is search and destroy," said Michael Fertik, ReputationDefender's founder and CEO. "We go out and find everything about you or your kid on the Internet and if you want us to, we seek to get it removed."

So far, ReputationDefender has removed 50 links associated with the law school student from the Internet. Like her, many of the firm's clients were burned when photographs they posted on social networking sites showed up elsewhere.

"I can't tell you how many clients we have that are on some prominent social networking site," Fertik said. "How many times, routinely, those photographs end up on the Internet along with really salacious commentary with women, obnoxious commentary with men."

A recent graduate of Harvard Law school, Fertik uses copyright law to help initiate litigation against Web sites that refuse to remove a client's content. Fertik doesn't believe in hacking sites or destroying legitimate news articles, but he does maintain that even in cyberspace, people have a right to privacy.