The Future of Reputation (by law professor Daniel Solove) is a book that generally examines the privacy tweaks that have occurred due to changes in technology over the past 10 or so years.  The overall thesis of the book is that the modern era leaves greater room and provides more powerful tools for invasions of privacy and threats to reputation.  To temper this, something must be done.  I don’t necessarily disagree with this, but I think it’s quite possible that we’re catching the paradigm shift in mid-shift, and no one’s really sure how things will pan out in the future when the dust settles.  (Very insightful on my part, I know.)  We could live to see the day where employers don’t think to “google” prospective employees.  I don’t think it’s so easy to say that the self-publishing tools which are readily made available to everyone coupled with Google and a few changes in the law (mainly Section 230) have created the perfect storm of tools to harm reputations and out private information in a manner that’s unprecedented.

Solove starts with an anecdote – one many many (millions) of internet users have been exposed to:  the dog poop girl.  A young woman fails to heed the scoop laws while on a Seoul subway; a passenger snaps a picture with his cell phone.  Next thing she knows, the young woman is forever labeled as the “dog poop girl”.  Solove cites to many similar examples of events which in eras past would have resulted in nothing more than a stray mention at a cocktail party or a small byline in the local alternative weekly.  In today’s day and age, they have become indelibly etched in the collective (internet) memory.  These include, the posts from Jessica Cutler (of Washingtonienne fame) about her then-lover’s sexual habits, the video of the so-called “ Stars Wars Kid” dancing with the lightsaber, and the “can-do-anything” applicant for the investment banking job.  These, and other similar anecdotes, were small stories which pretty much spiraled out of control.  Solove’s central point is that this type of information spreading is much easier now, since everyone has the ability to be a publisher.  Solove posits that there are two additional ingredients to the mix. 

First, to begin with American defamation law is much more speaker friendly than its Anglo counterpart.  In the online context, this is magnified by a piece of legislation known as “Section 230,” which – broadly speaking – provides immunity to websites and other companies who make third party content available via the internet.  The result is that websites are more apt to spread both good and bad information.

Second, is the ubiquitous Google.  You spill the beans about your neighbor’s movie watching habits and this may not turn out to be the next dog poop girl story on the internet.  Nevertheless, with the advent of Google, you’ve just left what could be the equivalent of a digital scarlet letter for your neighbor’s future friends, employers, or dates.  To them, this information is a simple Google search away. 

Solove has two suggestions to remedy the current reputational crisis.  First, he suggests that the law should evolve.  It should evolve to encourage alternative dispute resolution between those whose reputations have been harmed and the perpetrators of potential harm.  He argues that the law should also broaden to recognize more than just binary categories of private vs. non-private categories of information.  His second suggestion is that we should develop better defined norms which people should adhere to.  As a final possibility, he offers that companies should be more sensitive to the privacy interests of consumers, for example, by structuring websites in a manner that gives consumers greater choice for what details about them is broadcast and what is not.  Admittedly, Solove leaves his recommendations somewhat open ended. 

Solove’s work is a compact summary of many of the factors that influence the treatment of reputation-related information on the internet.  It’s well worth reading, whether you are an observer, participant, publisher, lawyer, website owner, parent, blogger, or even I would guess, someone looking back in 2017 at the way things were ten years ago.  Given the breadth of the topic and the small number of pages Solove had to work with (205) it’s tough to not find yourself sharply crying out for some additional explanation in some places.  For example, the number of blogs exploded in the past 5 years and no big players really “controlled the space.”  Nowadays, it’s tough to deny that a few big players (granted, they may shift over time) control the bulk of traffic for various social segments.  Given this, it’s extremely difficult to push a story into the mainstream consciousness if you are an average individual armed with just a modem and an opinion.  The little guys have to place a story with the bigger websites in order to start the next “dog poop girl” story.  It would have been nice to see some more focus on the concept of the “marketplace of ideas,” and how this plays out in the current internet landscape.  Similarly, it seems like Solove places inordinate emphasis on blogs and blog comments.  (Understandable, given that Solove is a somewhat prominent law blogger.)  But in the overall scheme of things, the numbers of devoted blog readers probably pale in comparison to general web surfers, and the number of relevant disputes over reputation which are played out in blog comments are probably a fairly small number.  (As a side note, many communicate and use message boards and bulletin boards – in these communities norms are more likely regularly enforced.)  In light of this, it seems like search engines such as Google should take on increased importance for privacy and reputation on the internet.  The problem of high traffic blogs is fairly similar to the problems we’ve seen before when reputation and media collide.  There’s not much new here, except for liability issues, which are not so interesting to the overall discussion.  Search engines are arguably the new technology that make leaving someone the equivalent of an online scarlet letter much easier.  It would be nice to see some discussion of the various factors that affect the search engines’ involvement in this equation, and what (if any) suggestions Solove has to address the problem he identifies through regulation of search engines. 

In the end, the Future of Reputation is an informative, entertaining, and a quick read.  It raises a lot more questions than it answers, but that’s probably what Solove set out to do in the first place.