Regulating 'reputation bankruptcy' will be an immense job

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 | By Vikki Chowney

Various methods of managing this are mentioned, including the European Union’s Think B4 U post! campaign and paid-for services that contact websites individually to remove offending items.

Facebook is an obvious focus throughout, as is the notion of expanding laws to protect privacy. A recent study from the University of California at Berkeley, for instance, found that 88% of people aged between 18 and 22 said there should be laws that require websites to delete all stored information about individuals.

The article is very comprehensive in factoring in the multitude of influences that make up online reputation, and – like Mandelson’s use of blogger relations last week (nma.co.uk 19 July 2010) – shines a light on the issue to a broad audience. I’m pleased that the tone is so level-headed. A piece in the New York Times has the potential to start a panic if worded incorrectly.

The one part of the story that I simply can’t agree with, however, is the comment made by Jonathan Zittrain, who teaches cyberlaw at Harvard Law School. I met him at TED Global last year, where he was giving a talk on using the web to share random acts of kindness. He’s a smart guy and the topic of his session shows that he’s an optimist, to put it lightly.

He supports the idea of giving people a chance to wipe their reputation slate clean and start over. Rosen quotes Zittrain as believing that “people should be allowed to declare ’reputation bankruptcy’ every ten years or so, wiping out certain categories of ratings or sensitive information.” His model is the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which requires consumer-reporting agencies to provide you with one free credit report a year – so you can dispute negative or inaccurate information – and prohibits the agencies from retaining negative information about bankruptcies, late payments or tax liens for more than ten years.

Rosen also includes a quote from Zittrain’s book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It: “Like personal financial bankruptcy, or the way in which a state often seals a juvenile criminal record and gives a child a ’fresh start’ as an adult, we ought to consider how to implement the idea of a second or third chance into our digital spaces.”

Giving people another chance is something I believe in strongly. But to be frank, Zittrain’s idea scares the hell out of me. Who’s going to regulate this? Will we be giving paedophiles and scammers a get-out-of-jail-free card every ten years? And is this a paid-for concept or would it be automatic? How about the scale of this? It’s an immense job.

Using the actions of a naive teenager as a benchmark for recruitment or to judge their character on for their entire adult life is unfair. But surely there’s an element of common sense involved? Maybe an employer who does that might not be the best company to work for?

Either way, I worry about wiping the slate clean entirely. Learning from your mistakes is much easier if they’re out there for people to see. If you know you’ll be able to start again, do you become more reckless? People are becoming more accustomed to transparency online, from brands and from individuals. There’s often a backlash to deleted posts or hidden comments, so what would the response be to something of this scale?

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