I found this completely by accident, but once I had read through it I was glad that I had found it.

I was looking at an example of a new WordPress plug-in called Link Harvest at work, and I followed one of the links to NSLog(); – the Weblog of Erik J. Barzeski. There I found an article about someone who had employed a company to ask him to remove a harmless comment from a three-year-old blog entry.

A few minutes ago, I received an email from “Dave S” of “ReputationDefender, Inc.” In short, the email requested that I remove a comment by Julian on a very old entry. I was asked to make this change because “he considers his comments to be outdated” and that complying would “go a long way to help make the Internet a more civil place.”

As someone who wishes he could “undo” a few of the things he’s done publicly, I wish that fixing one’s reputation was as simple as asking nicely in the name of civility. It just doesn’t work that way, folks.

Of course I then went to find the ReputationDefender, Inc web site, which is where the fun starts.

Where shall I begin? With “up popped something called myspace.com. Curious she clicked on it” perhaps?

It seems to me that this represents the backlash of the frightened and bewildered to some of the issues raised in the books and articles I mentioned in Privacy: the final frontier. I could write about this at length, but for the moment I am happy to let it speak for itself.

I shall just note that this site seems to promise to deliver the impossible, to people who don’t know any better, since I don’t believe that there is any way that they can remove material from the Internet Archive, where it will live on in searchable perpetuity.

In its tone, and its apparent appeal to the technically clueless (see the FAQs and the testimonials pages), it reminds me of government anti-drug propaganda from the nineteen fifties.

“Oh, my god”, indeed.