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When sensitive personal data makes its way onto the internet, removing it can be difficult and time-consuming.
In some cases, it may even be impossible.
All too often, unfortunately, people learn this the hard way.
(Thankfully, though, even if you can’t get bad news removed, there are other ways to deal with it.)
Effective reputation management and data removal companies can help people who find themselves in this difficult situation.
But which do you need: Reputation management, or data removal?
Are they the same? And what can you expect from each process?
Summary: removal vs. reputation management.
- Two very different services: Reputation management and data removal are two very different services.
- Both can be done for free, but are extremely time-consuming: Both reputation management and data removal can be done for free by the person affected, however that typically involves a tremendous amount of time and effort, and, unfortunately, is rarely completely effective.
- Two very different price points: Reputation management is usually very expensive.
- Data removal is usually very affordable and often follows a monthly subscription plan that ensures your data remains off a large list of websites.
- One reason both options can be difficult to navigate for someone dealing with these problems for the first time is that, more often than not, the individuals or companies that have put yours and many others sensitive personal information online do so to make money off it.
- Data removal usually consists of using (or subscribing to) a service that has automated all of the opt-out requirements for each of the websites that profit from placing sensitive information online. There are hundreds of them. A good data removal service is one that is aware of each of these websites, and has programmed into their service a way to rapidly get the information removed without spending the many, many hours it would take to get it removed manually.
- Reputation management is made up of a variety of tactics and actions implemented with the intention of making a negative news story, bad reviews, unfavorable search results, etc. less likely to be found.
What data removal is:
Simplistically speaking, data removal is the removal of one’s personal or identifying information off of a large list of websites that are usually making money off of this data in some way.
For example, if you were to Google your own name, you’ll find a long list of websites claiming to know X number of people by that name, along with where they’ve lived and worked over the last several years or decades.
The problem with this is that these websites actually do know these people—yourself included—and they know way too much about you.
And it’s not just 1 website. Or 10. Or 100.
InfoRemover.com, for example, has a list of 192 different websites, all of which contain some degree of usually sensitive personal information.
Why are so many websites doing this?
Because your data is profitable to them.
Most of them include legally-necessary disclaimers saying the information can’t be used to deny you a loan or employment.
Yet, your information is all out there for as little as $16.99 per report.
And that report is long and extremely detailed.
It probably contains information that you don’t even remember about yourself.
- What was your address 20 years ago?
- Who have you been employed by?
- What school, college, or university did you attend?
- What are your family member’s names?
- Etc., etc., etc.
The only pluspoint in this disaster is that these particular websites are required to remove your data if you request that they do so.
The requirements you need to meet for removal vary by each site.
For some, you’ll need to fax them, for others you’ll need to call. Or email. Or send a letter via the post office.
Multiply that by nearly 200 websites, and you can see how much of a hassle it would be to remove your data.
Of course, you’re not the first person this has happened to.
It happens to all of us, actually, but not everyone has known that they can do something about it.
InfoRemover.com uses a purpose-built software to meet all of the removal requirements for you.
For each of the nearly 200 websites where your information might be, it knows exactly what to do to meet the site’s removal requirements, and it fulfills those requirements for you.
When you sign up for a subscription with a data removal company, that’s the service you’re getting.
Whether you choose to do data removal on your own or with a company, the process is the same.
So where does “Reputation Management come in?
What reputation management is:
As stated earlier, reputation management is a very, very different service and process.
Let’s say you owned a business that had been hit by a bad news story.
Maybe that story was accurate, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe, that “journalist” never even reached out to you or your company. We hear that all too often.
Sadly, the article is now up online, and will remain there for a good long while.
When someone Google’s your name or your company’s name, that news story will likely show up on or near the first page of Google’s search results.
There are several reasons for this:
- Google prefers giving readers both the positive and negative about a topic searched for. This gives even low-quality “bad articles” a place higher than a “good article” of similar quality would get.
- The news publication or website writing about you and your company likely has a “high domain rating.” Domain ratings are signals that essentially tell Google a website’s content is worth putting higher on its search results.
- The article on you and your company contains “keywords” that have very likely been used for exactly that purpose: To get the article to show up as “great match” for a query on Google looking for information about your name or company.
- If what occurred to/with you and your company is newsworthy or is in the public’s interest to know, it may even appear on Google’s “News” tab. Not all websites can get there, but many can and do.
- Since bad news is clicked on more often than good news, the problem is self-perpetuating. Clicks into a website or article are another sign to Google that whatever it is serving up to readers is meeting their needs.
So reputation management—very different from data removal—consists of a specific set of tasks done to permanently remove that bad article off of the internet or, more commonly, to move it down off of Google’s page one, and bury it as deeply in search results as possible.
These tasks will vary depending on what the article is about, what website or websites it appears on right now, how high it is on Google’s search engine results, how strong or powerful the website is—Is it the New York Times?—and many, many other factors.
That’s why most reputation mangement companies cost a lot of money. You can typically expect to pay approximately $10,000 for each bad article you want removed. Here again, the only positive side to this is that if the company is ineffective at removing the article, you won’t usually be charged.
Lawyers, for example, offer reputation management as a service because they can use legal jargon to scare smaller websites into removing content that larger publications typically would not remove.
If the article you want removed is hosted on a website (or server, more accurately) that isn’t in the United States, the odds of anyone removing the article are extremely low, whether lawyers are involved or not.
Only a handful of lawyers engage in reputation management, but paralegals are common in many of the first that use other tactics to clean up someone’s reputation.
What that usually means is you can have a bad article “removed” after lots of work is done to lower its position in search results, only to discover 8-12 months later that the article made its way back onto page one.
That happens when your reputation management doesn’t keep up its work, or merely when Google—in any of its many algorithm updates done throughout the year—decides that that negative article is actually valuable to readers.
And Google puts it back up, one page one or two of their search results.
When to use which service:
In summary, here is when you would want to consider paying for and using either service:
- Data Removal: You should use data removal if you’re worried about your general personal information being readily accessible by anyone on the internet looking for it.
- Reputation Management: You should use reputation management if there is a specific article, review, or critique online that is causing you or your company to have an undeserved bad reputation. Whether this is 1 bad article or 5 bad articles, reputation management would apply.
Pros and Cons of each:
- Reputation management is costly and not always effective.
- Reputation management can help you restore or polish up the reputation of you or your company.
- Data removal is inexpensive and effective at removing your data from a large number of public websites.
- Data removal helps you take back control of your own personal data, which individuals and companies may be profiting off of without your consent.
- Data removal removes large amounts of your personal data currently online.
- Reputation management either removes or de-ranks certain negative publicity about you or your company, one piece or one article at a time.
- Data removal takes time and effort—but our service automates that and makes it affordable.
- Reputation management takes time, money, and effort, and can not be automated
