[HN Gopher] How the powerful clean up their digital past using a...
___________________________________________________________________
How the powerful clean up their digital past using a reputation
laundering firm
Author : DamnInteresting
Score : 266 points
Date : 2022-02-08 06:00 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (restofworld.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (restofworld.org)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I remember reading an article in _Encyclopedia Dramatica_ (I
| won't link to it, as it's fairly NSFW), in which they posted a
| bunch of really tasteless pictures of some poor girl's body,
| after a horrific auto accident. These were taken by a first
| responder at the scene.
|
| She came from a prominent family, and the family hired one of
| these firms to "clean up" the images.
|
| It did not seem to work. In fact, it seemed to have the opposite
| effect (see "Streisand Effect"). Trolls tend to take this kind of
| thing as a challenge.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Can't she DMCA their host providers? Unless it's on the dark
| web or some sort of self hosting.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| Good luck making a case that you have the copyright to some
| picture of you taken by someone else. If anyone, the picture
| taker may have the copyright.
|
| Some jurisdictions have the concept of a "right to your own
| image" if you are relatively unknown or if the image does not
| have sufficient content to suggest public interest, but
| afair, the US does not.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _ED_ is a fairly notorious site. I suspect they have 3
| lawsuits on the front burner, on any given day.
|
| Also, she (of course) did not take the picture, nor did
| anyone in her family. I suspect the FR that took the picture
| was fired with extreme prejudice. It may have even been
| illegal to take them. It was certainly a fairly abhorrent
| thing to do.
|
| But it wasn't a copyright violation.
| netsharc wrote:
| This story is also mentioned in Lo and Behold, the Werner
| Herzog documentary about the creation and effects of the
| Internet.
| Nursie wrote:
| I've seen it fail as well, an old friend had some rather
| intimate pictures leaked. They sank a lot of money into
| suppressing them but ultimately it seems to be a fruitless
| endeavour.
| toyg wrote:
| You cannot guarantee suppression but you can discreetly
| reduce frequency until very few available versions exist, and
| hope they quietly die in the long run. You see this happening
| with certain videos and pictures, typically sex-related.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| I hear Elon Musk does this with old articles about his
| history. The skeptic community actively tries to archive
| the old stuff. Furthermore he also seems to employ SEO
| techniques to stay on top of any negative stories. For
| example, there was a Tesla Whistleblower story about some
| FSD controversy (the millionth one). Next thing you know he
| releases a literal Tesla Whistle on the company store and
| all of a sudden when you search Tesla Whistleblower....you
| are inundated with articles about Tesla's contribution in
| the field of human powered audible alert systems.
| javajosh wrote:
| Whether or not it's a prominent family, the continued
| distribution of ghoulish photographs of a dead young girl
| _should_ come with substantial criminal penalties. There is no
| possible justification for it - it 's not like it's a free
| speech issue. No family should have to deal with this along
| with the grieving process.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _it 's not like it's a free speech issue_
|
| Why is it unrelated to free speech? It seems like it would be
| a free speech issue if pre-accident images weren't allowed to
| be published, e.g., in a news article about the accident. I
| don't see a material difference that would take accident
| photos out of the domain of free speech.
|
| For my part, as a parent, I would never want to _look at_
| such photos. I would however be alright with their use, for
| example in safe driving campaigns in drivers ed courses. I
| believe some driving courses (specifically against drunk
| driving) have done exactly that. I 'm sure other families
| would feel differently, but I don't think there's a prima
| facie case to be made that no family ever would be okay with
| this and that it would always increase the emotional toll, or
| never have any benefit.
|
| I certainly don't like them being published merely to satisfy
| the morbid curiosity of random internet folks, but I also
| don't see how you ban that without potentially running afoul
| of (US) free speech rights that have strict limits on speech
| restraints. Obscenity is one of those limits, but the law has
| continually struggle to find a bright line rule by which to
| measure such things. At a minimum, that lack of clarity still
| places this sort of image within the domain of free speech
| issues.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| macilacilove wrote:
| If there is any suspicion that the prominent child's death
| was not an accident, it can very quickly become a free speech
| issue.
| tgv wrote:
| "Trolls" (not sure if that's the correct term in this case) can
| only cover a small part of all the reputation repairs. Most of
| them stay below the radar, so nobody will even know it's been
| done.
| [deleted]
| userbinator wrote:
| "right to forget" = "right to rewrite history". When that idea
| was conceived, I knew how dangerous it would be, and what it
| could lead to.
|
| "He who controls the past controls the future."
| moralestapia wrote:
| Google already does it for free with their billion-dollar AI
| algorithms that can't find anything relevant to a query.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Us less powerful people should also have a habit of cleaning up
| our social media presence.
|
| When people go digging around other peoples old social media
| posts, nothing good has ever come from it. If your 5+ year old
| tweets or instagram photos have actual value to you, curate them
| to a blog you control and delete from the platforms.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| I mean they will just scrape your stuff, and if its simple
| blogs it is slightly easier to nab all that stuff vs Instagram.
| Isn't that what happened to Richard Stallman?
| gzer0 wrote:
| The amount of nonsensical DMCA requests I have received is
| absolutely ridiculous.
|
| Even more concerning, is the blind application of these DMCA
| requests for takedown by the registrars. We are heading down a
| very concerning path here.
| nsajko wrote:
| Relevant Wikipedia pages:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminalia
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation_management
|
| Relevant HN discussions:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5926408
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21784533
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26924109
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| Misleading title. Theoretically, sure 'powerful' could mean those
| who are 'powerful' in the knowledge of how to do this - but i do
| not believe that is what the title was trying to do.
|
| Anyone can do this, and have done this.
|
| What these companies offer is the legwork, the right contacts at
| sites, and potential templates that make communication sound like
| it comes from solicitors/lawyers.
|
| Reputation management has been around for thousands of years.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| I wonder how much of a business the reverse would be.
|
| A "reputation archive" company that keeps vouched copies of
| potentially harmful dirt on "the powerful", available on demand.
| Sure you can do opposition research to dig up things, but why go
| through that effort when you can simply wait passively and
| harvest later?
| wpietri wrote:
| Seems like it might be monetizeable through ads, as soon you'd
| be the top search result for a bunch of terms that otherwise
| won't have good hits.
|
| While I was developing my @sfships Twitter bot, I needed to
| look up a ton of locodes, 5-character codes for "economically
| significant" places. The agency in charge of them releases it
| as CSV and Microsoft Access files, so it's a pain to quickly
| access the data. I said, "fuck this" and turned it into a
| website. E.g.:
|
| https://locode.info/USNYC
|
| On a lark, I put some Google Ads on it; a few times a year
| Google sends me $100. More than enough to pay for the site
| itself. Given that I haven't touched it in a few years that's
| good enough for me.
| ben_w wrote:
| How do you know if you're looking at a real honest archive, or
| someone that inserted libel (or even just reputation damaging
| BS below the threshold for libel) in exchange for money?
|
| Although the phrase "fake news" itself is a used as a magic
| wand to dismiss uncomfortable facts, this can and does happen.
| wongarsu wrote:
| The best way around that would be basically a list of
| internet archive snapshots of newspaper articles. You can
| probably automate it somewhat by watching relevant
| newspapers, submitting everything for archival at a trusted
| 3rd party, then checking what gets removed by the publication
| or delisted at google.
| toyg wrote:
| There used to be sites that would do this diffing on news-
| sites, I even tried building one at some point. The idea
| was to reduce the memory-hole effect that the web
| infrastructure has produced and promoted. I remember Mark
| Pilgrim at one point targeting Dave Winer with something
| like that, as they were feuding and Winer is/was known for
| rewriting his blogposts.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > A "reputation archive" company that keeps vouched copies of
| potentially harmful dirt on "the powerful", available on
| demand.
|
| These companies do exist; I tried to google but came up empty,
| but I've heard that there are companies that keep collections
| of dirt on people like politicians, that can be released at
| strategic times (e.g. before elections). It's likely the
| various 'secret' services around the world have similar caches,
| like this rumour that the Kremlin had 'kompromat' on Trump
| (camera footage of prostitutes pissing on him or something),
| threatening to release it if he didn't do as they told him. I
| mean nothing came of that, as far as we know, so it might've
| just been propaganda, but it sounds plausible enough - both
| that Trump would be doing that, and that the KGB or whatever it
| is these days would have cameras in dignitaries' hotel rooms.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| The Steele dossier was and is still unsubstantiated to put it
| lightly, stop spreading lies.
|
| It was both a misdirection and a smear campaign that actually
| involved Hunter Biden according to his past history, the
| laptops, and the video of him admitting such to a prostitute:
|
| https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/hunterbiden/video-2479077/.
| ..
|
| > "I wake up and the only people that are there are Miguel,
| the guy frantically running round gathering things up, ok -
| and Miguel, and Pierce, this guy, his friend," he allegedly
| added. "They had kicked everybody out. And they had cleaned
| up the entire place, everything ok? And they were getting
| ready to leave, and I woke up. And there was this Russian
| 35-year-old, really nice, pure brunette. She refused to leave
| and they wouldn't call an ambulance. And they didn't know
| whether I was dead or not, at first."
|
| > "I think he's the one that stole my computer. I think the
| three of them, the three guys that were like a little group.
| The dealer and his two guys, I took them everywhere. F* _ing
| everywhere, crazy out of your mind sh*," he says. "They have
| videos of me doing crazy f*_ ing sex f**ing, you know."
|
| > Later, the woman asks Hunter if he is concerned that the
| videos could be used to "blackmail" him.
|
| > "Yeah in some way yeah," Hunter responds. "My dad
| [inaudible] running for president. He is. I talk about it all
| the time."
| barry-cotter wrote:
| If Trump frequented sex workers surely some evidence would
| have shown up? It's not like he's discreet about his
| marriages, affairs and dalliances. He doesn't appear to be
| capable of shutting up.
| wpietri wrote:
| You miss how enormously vindictive and litigious he is.
| What sex worker wants to spend years getting sued, having
| every negative aspect of their life dragged into the public
| spotlight, etc, etc?
| ineedasername wrote:
| _It's not like he's discreet_
|
| He's paid off & NDA'ed a few known people, it's possible
| that not everyone he's done that with bothered to come
| forward once he was president. He may appear indiscreet
| merely because his efforts failed in two cases but not in
| others. Those two failures show that he was making
| significant efforts to keep this sort of thing discreet.
|
| This is by no means intended as an argument that additional
| incidents like this took place, only the observation that
| claiming something that already has precedent didn't happen
| again because _" evidence would have shown up"_ is flawed
| justification.
| ben_w wrote:
| Didn't one of those sex workers [0] get paid to sign an NDA
| about the sex?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormy_Daniels-
| Donald_Trump_sc...
|
| [0] sex worker in this case being porn actress not AFAIK a
| prostitute; I don't know which of "porn star" or
| "prostitute" would've been more damaging in the view of
| Trump's advisers with regard to his expected electoral
| result at the time, as American cultural attitudes to
| sexuality are basically alien to me.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It happened enough that he had a business arrangement with
| the National Enquirer to pay for and kill the stories. Also
| "Stormy Daniels".
|
| The genius of Trump is that he's able to normalize it. He
| had scandals every week that would take down most people.
| mlac wrote:
| It's damaging on a whole other level to have video of
| someone peeing on the president of the United States.
|
| Maybe his core would say "that's fake, but even if it's
| real, then hey, what he's into, he's into - people can do
| weird stuff". But actually seeing the video of someone
| peeing on the president of the United States is humiliating
| for the party and the country, and would (maybe?) be enough
| to have him sidelined.
|
| They could argue "respect the office, not the person", but
| the counter would quickly be "if a person doesn't have
| enough respect to not be peed on by another human being,
| then maybe they shouldn't hold the office".
|
| I mean - it would just be replayed over and over and the
| Streisand effect would take hold. Any pro-trump person
| would probably have to wade through replies with links of
| him being urinated on. Quickly jokes would come up about
| him taking crap, it'd be thrown into debates. Chants would
| be made... the little decal of the guy peeing on stuff
| would quickly be put over trump name or campaign stickers.
| thom wrote:
| Surely an even better business would be to _create_ this dirt?
| All you'd need is a jet, a private island, and an international
| human trafficking ring. You'd be set for life!
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I'm sure someone is operating a company doing this already.
| Opposition research is a thing.
| [deleted]
| MadSudaca wrote:
| One problem is that often you can't tell who's going to be
| powerful in advance. So by the time they go under the
| spotlight, they have had time to clean up their dirt.
| titzer wrote:
| When you have 20,000 quadrillion bytes of storage, you can
| just do everyone.
| dboreham wrote:
| It's called "The National Enquirer"
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| There are sites in tourist towns that publish pictures of
| mugshots and then charge you to take them down. Had a friend
| get arrested while drunk and have to pay to get his picture
| taken down.
| kodah wrote:
| > A "reputation archive" company that keeps vouched copies of
| potentially harmful dirt on "the powerful", available on
| demand.
|
| Sounds like you've come up with a business plan even more
| harmful than Facebook.
|
| When I did some volunteer work with a Progressive organization
| I found out that there's an underground of people who do
| exactly this work. Their archives are private, though, and I
| can't speak to their vetting process. When I learned about it
| the only thing I could say was, "This sounds like
| professionalized character assassination."
| thrown_22 wrote:
| belter wrote:
| Wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/
| cpsns wrote:
| I can't afford such services, but I can use the laws in my
| favour. For example I lost the password to a youtube channel from
| my teenager years. I wouldn't have wanted the content associated
| with adult me, so I simply DMCA'd myself and had the videos
| removed.
| jannyfer wrote:
| Recently I read the book "Shoe Dog" and was curious who one of
| the characters were (Sarah).
|
| I couldn't find it on Google, and was surprised that either
| nobody on the internet had talked about it, or Google had just
| become so bad for deep searches that it could only give me
| results about shoes and people named Sarah.
|
| Maybe this had to do with why... And if so, I guess I have to
| just get used to not being able to satisfy my curiosity.
| subpixel wrote:
| hendrikrassmann wrote:
| There is also a (conspiracy?) theory about the movie Frozen and
| the rumor that Walt Disney froze his head to be reanimated at a
| later point in time,
| linkjuice4all wrote:
| These techniques are also used by everyday "boring" brands to
| sink bad reviews and similar. In many cases it's primarily US-
| based companies that are leveraging some of these EU protections
| in addition to all the copyright/DMCA stuff in the US.
|
| It's not really that expensive either. You can go with a
| reputation management company or just use your own legal team
| once you're large enough.
|
| The more-annoying part is that it is getting harder to see who
| and what has been taken down so it's harder to track the
| information that's being targeted and the people behind it.
| Google has been providing less information in the DMCA notices
| (they used to basically be a complete list of the offending
| content) - I think now they just list paths or domains but not
| the complete URL.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > leveraging some of these EU protections in addition to all
| the copyright/DMCA stuff in the US.
|
| I spent quite a bunch of time in Europe last year and would see
| quite a few search results noting something being removed under
| EU right to be forgotten legislation. Often I wondered wtf
| could have been removed. The law is probably abused for PR
| reasons, but like dmca, would cost a lot to fight and better to
| hope it stays under the radar and unpopular.
|
| Also saw lots of blurred out stuff on google maps, but yandex
| is rather willing to share the sat views of prisons and other
| facilities ;)
| [deleted]
| dsr_ wrote:
| Yesterday I was cold-called by a firm that said that it could do
| things like this. I asked about their methods, and was told that
| they could find and remove trademark infringement, secrets and
| embarassing material from all social media and "the dark web",
| typically within 48 hours.
|
| I asked if they had contracts with any of the social media
| companies, to which the salescritter responded that they had an
| excellent track record. I asked why the social media companies
| would pay more attention to their requests and take-down notices
| than they would to mine, and got no particular reassurances.
|
| I suggested that if they could come back to me with proof that
| they had contracts with three social media companies, then I
| would consider them. I don't think I'll be hearing back.
| robk wrote:
| If they were good they may have support or ops people on
| payroll. I was surprised no one had done this at Google. Would
| have been easy to get away with back in the day.
| woah wrote:
| If this was something that you wanted done, I think it would
| absolutely make sense to pay someone experienced to do it. They
| will know the right places to submit the requests, follow up on
| it, etc. It all depends on how valuable your time is and how
| interested you are in doing it yourself.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| >I asked why the social media companies would pay more
| attention to their requests and take-down notices than they
| would to mine, and got no particular reassurances
|
| it wouldn't be hard to go on LinkedIn and find some of
| Twitter's content managers and bribe them by paying them on the
| side to prioritize certain requests. Amazon had an issue with
| this related to their product ratings
|
| https://www.techspot.com/news/76465-amazon-employees-alleged...
| metacritic12 wrote:
| Would you actually buy their services or are you just baiting
| them / trying to figure out how it work and would never
| actually buy? I think salespeople at these sorts of companies
| are probably really good at filtering out the second.
| dsr_ wrote:
| To the best of my knowledge, while the company has various
| secrets, none of them would be particularly embarassing. We
| wouldn't bother buying one of these services in advance of
| having a problem.
|
| In my experience, the vast majority of salescritters making
| cold calls don't know much about the product that they are
| selling. They have about three paragraphs of information at
| their fingertips, and that's it. They often don't know
| whether it runs as a service or as delivered software, what
| operating systems it uses or can support, and in many cases
| they don't understand what it does or why someone would want
| to buy it.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _I think salespeople at these sorts of companies are
| probably really good at filtering out the second._
|
| Why would they be "really good" at "filtering out the
| second", as opposed to them just being a minimum viable
| outsourced sales department?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "There's a picture of me in the Bitcoin blockchain, can you get
| it removed?" would be a fun litmus test for these folks.
| Guest42 wrote:
| I wonder if that could turn into a government justification
| for shutting down the blockchain, something they don't want
| in there.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| There's already one piece of CSAM in there.
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/20/child-
| abu...
|
| Anyone with a full Bitcoin node is _in theory_ in
| significant violation of US law; child porn is a strict
| liability scenario, where intent doesn 't matter.
| mrlemke wrote:
| I have had concerns about this possibility. Would it be
| possible for a miner to reject transactions containing
| this crap?
| inkblotuniverse wrote:
| Encrypt arbitrary data, put it on-chain, and then publish
| the key on-chain at a later date. No real way around that
| unless all miners opt to drop that metadata, which
| amounts to a fork
| SilasX wrote:
| Yes! I don't if there's a name for it, but that's a technique
| for vetting potential frauds -- ask them to do something
| impossible and see their reaction. It's arguably what the
| British MP was doing when he asked Charles Babbage if the
| Difference Engine would still give the right answers when you
| put the wrong numbers in.
| martin_a wrote:
| > would be a fun litmus test for these folks.
|
| I always thought the same about those companies who pose
| themselves as some "domain registration office" and tell me
| that they have a customers request to register
| $firstname$lastname.$tld but that they found out about me and
| would like to offer me the domain, because I'm $firstname
| $lastname obviously. What would keep me from registering a
| TLD by myself and then order them to do so?
|
| On the other hand: I already bought too many domains while
| being drunk, so I won't get deeper in to that.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > What would keep me from registering a TLD by myself and
| then order them to do so?
|
| Nothing's stopping that; you're just not the mark they're
| looking for.
|
| They're looking for people with little experience with
| domains who'll be told because of the other person's
| interest it's gonna cost $500 and you should act quick or
| forever lose it.
| pstuart wrote:
| There really should be a breathalizer requirement for
| domain purchases.
| Mezzie wrote:
| I'm so glad this isn't just me.
| memish wrote:
| rideontime wrote:
| It's actually pretty easy, you just have to DMCA the service
| the image is actually hosted on.
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| They could approach the intermediate services that are
| usually used to access the blockchain. Moxie had his NFT
| removed by one of the market places and gone it was from the
| wallet, gone for all practical purposes.
|
| https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| This is a super interesting article.
|
| I'd avoided looking into NFT's because the concept strikes
| me as being just, well, cringe, but I'd assumed at least
| that the chains stored the hash of a jpeg or something.
|
| You're telling me that they're not even immutable? They
| really just store urls with _no checksum of what's on the
| other end of the url_!?
| donmcronald wrote:
| That's the way I understood it and I was stunned. I
| absolutely love that he used a poop emoji for the NFT
| that you'd see in your wallet. Haha.
| bsamuels wrote:
| it's up to whoever created it. there's good permanent
| storage solutions out there like arweave, but if you're
| just trying to grift people, imgur should be fine.
| jcun4128 wrote:
| That's an interesting claim "permanently"
|
| > protocol matches people who have hard drive space to
| spare
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| I suppose the point is that you should use an url that's
| content addressable right?
| guelo wrote:
| So decentralized lol!
| [deleted]
| aaron695 wrote:
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| I was an editor at a cryptocurrency news site and i have been
| approached by a reputation management "SEO firm" before.
|
| I once got offered money to include the given name of a well
| known crypto startup founder in an existing positive article
| about him. Because if you searched for his given name back then,
| it brought you to his previous career photographing underage
| swimsuit models.
|
| This is what the redacted email said:
|
| >>
|
| My name is Kyle Kilgore and I am with Sharp SEO Services. A
| client of mine has contracted me out to work on a reputation
| management campaign for First Last.
|
| To verify what I am doing for First name please contact Mr.Last
| name and tell him I am working on behalf of Joseph Chinnock for
| making sure the changes on Google search engine's first page
| listing are the same for the keyword "Given name Last name" and
| "First name Last name"
|
| There are just two changes I need done and will be more than
| happy to pay for you time to do it. The article page below is the
| reference content where I need changes about First Last:
|
| [link redacted]
|
| The changes desired are highlighted in BOLD text. ---------------
| -----------------------------------------------------------------
| ----------------------- (1.)
|
| The title (H1 headers) needs to be changed from:
|
| _First Last_ Talks Newest _Company Name_ Innovation: ***
|
| To read as follows:
|
| _Given name Last name_ Talks Newest _Company name_ Innovation:
| *** -------------------------------------------------------------
| ------------------------------------------ (2.)
|
| As well as the first sentence in the first paragraph needs to be
| changed from:
|
| _company name_ 's co-founder First Last is no stranger to
| innovation.
|
| To read as follows:
|
| _company name_ 's co-founder _First Given Last_ is no stranger
| to innovation. --------------------------------------------------
| -----------------------------------------------------
|
| If there is a fee for having you change this please let me know
| how you accept payments for doing this. Also, if possible, I need
| to know if this name change gets approved or disapproved as soon
| as possible.
|
| I appreciate all your help and look forward to your response.
|
| Best regards, Kyle Kilgore
| openknot wrote:
| From my previous experience in the news industry, it would be
| almost offensive to receive an email like this if one were an
| editor of a news publication.
|
| Integrity as a journalist necessitates that one cannot accept
| payment from a person mentioned in a news article, and cannot
| agree to the attempt to compromise on journalistic
| independence. The cost to one's reputation as a journalist far
| outweighs the payment offered by the cold emailer from a
| reputation firm.
|
| For any commenters without experience in the news industry,
| this request is disrespectful to the recipient as it assumes
| that the owner of the news site can be bought for or influenced
| with pay.
| daenz wrote:
| I wonder if they have a sister company that specializes in
| blackmail.
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