ReputationDefender
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How do you bring a vision to life?  Michael Fertik talks innovation and entrepreneurship at the 2012 Blouin Leadership Summit.

Working women in Silicon Valley are the hot topic of late. Yahoo recently axed its telecommuting option, raising questions of the impact on working moms.  Sheryl Sandberg is encouraging women to “lean in.”  Marissa Mayer worked throughout a short maternity leave – and emphasized it publicly. Women are gaining ground in the gaming community, despite widely acknowledged sexism.

Silicon Valley’s female leaders are making more headlines and headway than ever before and yet stepping up and successfully recruiting and retaining women remains a tremendous challenge.

Both male and female leaders in the Valley want the tech and scientific space to appeal to women, not just because it’s the right thing to do but also because we really, really need them.

The research is clear: having women on your teams in meaningful roles makes you better:

•   Just “1.3 percent of privately-held companies have a female founder, 6.5 percent have a female CEO, and 20 percent or more have one or more female C-level executives.”  (“Women at the Wheel”)

•   61 percent of startups with five or more female executives were successful and 39 percent failed (“Women at the Wheel”)

•   Companies with the highest representation of women on management teams generate a 35 percent higher return on equity and a 34 percent higher return to shareholders.  (National Center for Women & Information Technology)

Yet women are leaving the tech industry in depressing droves – 56 percent of mid-level technical women quit, which is twice the rate of their male colleagues and despite the fact that 76 percent of technical women overall say they “love their work,” says the NCWIT.

Fixing this requires more than just flexible policies like telecommuting (though statistics show these are both retention and productivity boosters).  Here’s what needs to happen:

Change the conversation. Language is a lens – it creates the framework to view an issue.  When you use inclusive language, you create a culture where women and men are on equal footing.  For example, it’s not the plight of the working mom – it’s the pressures on working parents.  When dads are treated as an afterthought in the corporate conversation on flexibility, it minimizes the importance of a father’s contributions to his family.  At the same time, it elevates men’s status in the workplace, communicating subtly that women are less integral and perhaps more expendable when they have children.

Make your case and create a space. Talk openly to your staff – male and female – about the coming gap in the availability of skilled tech workers and strong scientists.  Make it clear that without women, it will be even more challenging to find the right staff to empower your organization. Create a space where it’s comfortable to give and receive feedback – and implement what’s feasible.  An open culture that embraces and implements reasonable feedback is going to be an attractive place to work for the long haul.

Hire women. Yes, it’s really that simple.  And as they approach that mid-level period when they may veer off the trajectory and quit, stay connected.  If you can, offer incentives – development courses, managerial and leadership programs, etc. – to ensure you’re supporting continued growth.

STEM the tide. It’s not new to anyone in science and tech that girls lose interest in math and science in middle school.  All tech, health care and science-driven organizations should be thinking about ways to “STEM” this tide; many established companies actively focus on outreach to young women.  And while startups are typically not in a position to initially do much when it comes to corporate social responsibility, there are ways to make a contribution.  Perhaps it’s creating a multi-stage “giving back” plan that ramps up as the company does.  Or maybe it’s as simple as joining forces with other startups to volunteer in the classroom, mentor young girls through existing nonprofits, or raise awareness through public platforms.

Many people correctly link Silicon Valley with professional progressiveness but it’s long past time we lived up to its promise.  We’re the place for the square pegs, the oddballs, the bendy minds, the innovative spirits and creative geniuses to come, play and stay.  We’re collectively in the business of “pioneering amazing” – revolutionizing the way people think, communicate, act and connect, and turning a profit while doing it.  

Our culture needs to welcome women as drivers of that revolution. 

Original article: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/03/28/step-it-up-silicon-valley/?print=true

In his first public speech since resigning as the head of the CIA, David Petraeus apologized Tuesday night for the conduct that led to his stepping down following the disclosure of an extramarital affair.

"Needless to say, I join you keenly aware that I am regarded in a different light now than I was a year ago," Petraeus said to a group of about 600 people, including many veterans at the University of Southern California's annual ROTC dinner.

"I am also keenly aware that the reason for my recent journey was my own doing. So please allow me to begin my remarks this evening by reiterating how deeply I regret — and apologize for — the circumstances that led me to resign from the CIA and caused such pain for my family, friends and supporters."

The hero of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has remained largely in seclusion since resigning. His lawyer, Robert B. Barnett, has said that Petraeus has spent much of that time with his family.

His affair with the retired four-star general's biographer, Paula Broadwell, was discovered during an FBI investigation into e-mails she sent to another woman she viewed as a rival for his attention.  At the time, Petraeus told his staff he was guilty of "extremely poor judgment."

"Such behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as the leader of an organization such as ours," he said.

As the military leader credited with reshaping the nation's counterinsurgency strategy, turning the tide in the U.S. favor in both Iraq and Afghanistan and making the U.S. safer from terrorism, Petraeus expected a friendly audience at the ROTC dinner.

At least one expert in crisis communications said that if his apology comes across as heartfelt and sincere, the public will indeed be seeing much more of him.

"America is a very forgiving nation," said Michael Levine who, among dozens of other celebrity clients, represented Michael Jackson during his first child molestation investigation.

"If he follows the path of humility, personal responsibility and contrition, I submit to you that he will be very successful in his ability to rehabilitate his image," he said.

Another longtime crisis communications expert, Howard Bragman, said Petraeus has handled the situation perfectly so far and he expects he'll continue to do so. He noted that unlike former president Bill Clinton, former U.S. senator John Edwards and other public figures caught in extramarital affairs, Petraeus didn't try to lie his way out of it, immediately took responsibility and moved on.

"I think the world is open to him now," said Bragman, vice chairman of the image-building company ReputationDefender. "I think he can do whatever he wants. Realistically, he can even run for public office, although I don't think he'd want to because he can make more money privately."

Petraeus, who wrote the U.S. book on counterinsurgency, led the temporary escalation in Iraq in 2007 before heading the U.S. Central Command and then directing forces in Afghanistan in 2010. He replaced Leon Panetta at the Central Intelligence Agency in July 2011 but served less than 18 months.

Original article: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/27/petraeus-affair-apology-speech/2023755/

Back in 2010, the newsdesk at The Age received a desperate plea from a man who wanted to be forgotten. Let's call him Alan. A young and foolish businessman, he was arrested 10 years ago at Melbourne airport when a baggage check found cocaine and another banned drug.

The Age published a simple, factual story in the paper and online, reporting his arrest, his contrition and his sentence – a good-behaviour bond without conviction. Alan promised the magistrate he would mend his ways. But Google never forgets. Today, if you Google Alan's real name, his past is exposed at the top of the search results: a link to The Age's report with a damning headline.

''This story still haunts him,'' a close friend and colleague of Alan tells The Age. He is now ''a sober man who has learnt from his mistakes'' trying to get back into his former industry. But everyone Googles potential employees these days. ''It has been eight years,'' the friend said in email. ''Let's try and give him a shot …rather than have some headline cut down his chances.''

The Age declined Alan's plea, and nevertheless he found work. But he, and many others, for countless reasons, have their crimes, misdemeanours, foibles or embarrassing photos forever preserved in the eternal memory of the digital mind.

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In Europe's highest court, judges are considering Spaniard Mario Costeja's attempt to stop Google turning up an online newspaper announcement that a property he owned was up for auction for failing to pay taxes. Spain now has more than 200 similar cases.

In Argentina, pop star Virginia Da Cunha filed suit against Google and Yahoo! when searches for her name turned up old, explicit photos published on sex sites. Last year there were reportedly 130 cases pending in the country, from entertainers, models and others demanding the removal of user-generated content.

And in Austria, 25-year-old Max Schrems has become famous for his war with Facebook, which he plans to take to court after he forced it to detail the incredible 1222 pages of data it held on him: pokes, likes, comments, photos, including data he had tried to delete, and data he could not normally access but was for Facebook's own use.

''I don't know that it's a new problem but the scale of the problem is vastly greater,'' says Jeffrey Rosen, professor of law at the George Washington University. ''The difficulty of escaping your past is greatly magnified in an age when every word we speak and every tweet and every Facebook status update is recorded forever in the digital cloud.

''It used to be that only celebrities would have to worry about embarrassing things people wrote about them in the newspapers – now each of Facebook's 1 billion users has the same problem, without the resources to manage their reputation online.

''In the age of Google, the worst thing you've done is the first thing that people know about you.''

Michael Fertik has built a new business model on reputation management for the average Joe – he's the founder of ReputationDefender. He puts the problem in even starker terms.

''Right now the basic internet [revenue] model is built on the invasion of your privacy,'' Fertik says.

''The basic internet model is: give you something free, collect your data and sell your data. Most of the big businesses on the internet [for example, Facebook, Google] are built on that model. Right now the status quo, the posture of the status quo, is the status of being dominated by people you can't identify.

''Your data is being exploited all the time by people you can't identify. And that's just backward. Now we have to rescue the truth by calling it 'the right to be forgotten', instead of saying 'the right not to be raped by people you can't identify'.''

The right to be forgotten. It's an old European idea, dating back to pre-internet days when people wanted to expunge their criminal pasts from the public record. In France it's poetically dubbed the ''droit d'oubli'', the right to oblivion.

Now the European parliament is debating legislation that updates the idea for the digital age. Under the new law, everyone would have the right to rectify and even erase personal data concerning them, if it was held or published by a commercial entity. If that right is denied, massive fines apply.

European Commissioner for Justice Viviane Reding says personal data has become many companies' most prized asset. ''Data is a valuable commodity – a digital currency,'' she says. ''Consumers need to be able to trust businesses with such a commodity. Right now, this is not the case. People don't always feel in full control of their personal data.

''Even tiny scraps of personal information can have a huge impact, even years after they were shared or made public. It is the individual who should be in the best position to protect the privacy of their data by choosing whether or not to provide it.''

The right isn't absolute. There is public interest in protecting the archives of a newspaper, or scientific research, for example. ''The right to be forgotten cannot amount to a right of the total erasure of history, [nor must it] take precedence over freedom of expression,'' Reding says.

But the proposal has inspired intense opposition from Silicon Valley, which has recognised the massive threat such a law poses to its revenue stream. Google's global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer has been one of the law's most scathing critics.

He argues a right to be forgotten would destroy ''databases of great value and beauty, and we will someday learn it would be a sin to obliterate them''. Botticelli burnt some of his paintings during an anti-vice purge, before he realised his tragic mistake.

''Over and over again, especially in Europe, I see 'privacy' being used as a justification to censor free speech,'' Fleischer wrote on his blog (he declined an interview with Fairfax, pointing us to his blog instead). ''I don't understand how we could protect notions of freedom of speech, and the neutrality of search engines, if people could decide themselves which terms they did not want associated with their names.''

Fleischer calls the right to be forgotten ''more pernicious than book burning''. ''[It] attempts to give to individuals the legal rights to obliterate unpalatable elements of their personal data, published in third-party sources,'' he says. ''This is a deeply pessimistic ideology, which concludes that retaining data can give rise to future risks and to future benefits, but since we don't yet know what they are, we should default to deleting the data to prevent the risks, rather than retaining them to enable the benefits.''

Rosen takes a slightly different view. He says it is fairly uncontroversial to assert a right for people to remove pictures (or other content) that they created themselves but now regret – such as the young teacher in training in the US who put a picture of herself on Myspace as a ''drunken pirate'' and lost her job.

''It becomes controversial when the content is shared by others,'' Rosen says. ''It raises serious questions of free expression. Though I sympathise intensely with the problem of digital forgetting on the internet, I do not think it's a good idea to create a broad new legal right to remove information that has been widely shared.''

Then there is a third category of information the proposed law would cover: information about you, posted by others.

''That right … would allow me to object to snarky blog posts about me written by someone else, and leave it up to a privacy commissioner to decide whether or not it's in the public interest,'' Rosen says. ''That's really where the gravest threat to free expression comes from. It sweeps so broadly, it completely challenges the idea that truthful but embarrassing information should not be able to be removed, that it's necessary for public discourse.

''And it would transform Google and Facebook into censors-in-chief. It really would transform the nature of the internet.''

ReputationDefender's Fertik agrees. But, so what? In the modern world, most employers look up prospective employees online. Hell, ''every single person you date looks you up online'', he says. ''Every kind of life transaction now that we live through is based on our data, our digital footprint. And it's very easy to get the wrong impression about someone on the internet. For the first time, the data is out there, so your reputation is, correctly or incorrectly, ascertainable by everyone. Therefore we have to adapt.''

Fertik says he ''loves'' the proposed right to be forgotten. He thinks it's ''awesome''.

''I'm an American, so I usually believe in free-market solutions to problems. I do believe that we can solve things without the government. But the concept of the right to be forgotten I think is a very beautiful one.

''It's a very old idea. Ideas about the privacy of the person are as old as Magna Carta … the internet is highly invasive of this virtue and highly destructive to this virtue. I believe that if you want to live a private life then you shouldn't have to avoid the internet.''

He says it is transparent why many Silicon Valley companies such as Google and Facebook, who depend on revenue from personally targeted advertising, oppose the law.

''[They] go to Congress and go to Brussels and say, 'No, don't change the status quo, don't do anything because what will happen is something called innovation will be killed'. And 'innovation' sounds like a magical word. But in Silicon Valley, innovation is just a disguising word for revenue. That's all it means.

''For sure, Google and Facebook will suffer if there's a right to be forgotten. They're going to have to take different steps and find out different ways to do business. But they are not the internet. Other companies will thrive. There will be new entrepreneurs with new methods.''

Anna Fielder, advocate at Privacy International, which has campaigned for the right to be forgotten, says it is not just a matter of protecting unwary teenagers from future embarrassment or discrimination. We should not be distracted by potential harm, we should assert a fundamental right.

''[It] is a question of you having control over your private life,'' she says. ''I might not want to share data after a certain time with certain people, it's my right to do so. [Do] you really want a third party, that you use as a platform, to dictate to you what they keep and not keep about your private life and private thoughts?''

She finds it hard to believe Google, Facebook and the like could not adapt. ''There are so many really clever technological means of mining your data and profiling you. Why is it so difficult to create the reverse, a privacy-enhancing technology?''

Rosen says one option is ''disappearing data''. When we post something online we could choose whether it stays online a day, a year, or forever, and encryption technology can ensure it will be unreadable after that point.

Already there are apps such as Snapchat, which allow people to send instant messages that disappear forever a few minutes after they are sent (though it is hard to stop people copying this ephemeral data to prevent it from expiring).

''I think it would at least go a long way towards empowering citizens to manage their online reputation,'' Rosen says. ''Google and Facebook have chosen for financial and other reasons not to make this technology encoded into their platforms, but legal or political pressure might encourage them to do so.''

Another possibility, he says, is that people will just become more forgiving. We now barely blink when the leader of a country confesses to rampant drug use in their college years. Maybe a youthful sexting scandal will afflict some presidential candidate in 30 years' time but no one will actually care.

''I'm not sure how optimistic I am on that score,'' he admits. ''It seems to clash with what we know about human nature to assume there will be nothing scandalous and everyone will lead transparent lives and be completely forgiving.''

So it is an urgent problem, he says. ''I'm just not persuaded that broad, new and largely unenforceable legal rights are the best way to deal with it.''

Original article: http://www.theage.com.au/technology/the-internet-never-forgets-20130322-2gle7.html

How do you bring a vision to life?  Michael Fertik talks innovation and entrepreneurship at the 2012 Blouin Leadership Summit.

As sequestration takes effect, our lawmakers will be asked to once again step up and pass a major debt-reduction deal. 

Let’s be clear: passing a sensible debt deal will be better for every single person in this country, from the Jaguar drivers to the bus-takers. Failure to bring this to a swift and decisive conclusion will be okay for the 1 percent and an absolute disaster for the 99 percent. As a relatively recent entrant to the former group and as a lifelong advocate for the latter, I say this with certainty.
Here’s why:

In this turbulent economic time, the 1 percent benefited disproportionately. Wealthy people in this country are standing at the top of the mountain, enjoying the vista, basically not even breaking a second-home sweat – while the rest of Americans labor up the incline, gasping for breath. Income inequality is at an epic point, the highest since the Great Depression. In 2011, the average income of a person in the top 1 percent was nearly $880,000. For the bottom 90 percent, the average income was just under $30K.

Some investment opportunities are only open to the few. There are certain financial opportunities – like hedge funds – that are only available to those with “accredited investor” status. Essentially, that means if you have a net worth that exceeds $1 million or if you make more than $200,000 a year, these investment opportunities are available to you but not others. If you’re able to take advantage of unique, limited investment opportunities, you get the opportunity to beat the S&P 500, while if you’re one of the 60 million workers invested in a 401(k), your returns are probably tied more to the performance of the S&P 500.

Resources are on call. What goes hand-in-hand with excellent investment opportunities? Resources. The 1 percent typically also has the backing of highly-paid legal and tax advisory firms to ensure that assets are protected, loopholes fully and legally exploited, and that every possible advantage is leveraged. The average American simply does not have the quiver full of resources to target and maximize positive life-altering opportunities.

Cash on hand. There’s a real advantage to having liquid assets. The wealthy know that cash on hand represents another form of power: the ability to reap the benefits of a down economy. When the bottom fell out of the housing market, individuals with cash on hand were able to pounce on extraordinarily cheap real estate, another investment for the future. Even if the real estate market takes longer than anticipated to rebound, these people aren’t relying on these investments for immediate returns.

The wealthy are not one shock away. A 2013 study is troubling: nearly half of American households, more than 132 million people, are one emergency away from financial ruin. In addition to people who don’t have three months of savings – the “liquid asset poor” – another 26 percent are “net worth asset poor,” meaning their debt far surpasses any assets they may have. Translation: no safety nets. That’s simply not the case for the 1 percent, who can typically weather an economic storm.

It’s long past time to come to a resolution on the debt recovery plan that would help all Americans, regardless of financial power. A failure driven by partisanship will be dangerous, risking the livelihoods of people around the world, up and down the economic value chain. The upcoming sequester issue is another opportunity in a long string of chances to show the courage, resourcefulness and fortitude we prize as defining American leadership.

America has unique regenerative capabilities – rallying in times of challenge to emerge on the other side, defiant and ever stronger. I hope and believe our government will be deserving of our confidence as it passes the policies that will enable our country to move into a period of growth and stability for everyone once more.

Original article: http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-a-budget/287093-fix-the-debt-help-the-99-percent#ixzz2R8pTFlVT

How do you bring a vision to life?  Michael Fertik talks innovation and entrepreneurship at the 2012 Blouin Leadership Summit.

EMBARRASSING pictures on Facebook show you dancing the hula naked at a frat party. A convicted bank robber in Texas has the same name as you—as every Google search makes all too clear. Such embarrassments would surely never befall you, dear reader. But they are common enough to spawn an entire business devoted to protecting and polishing people’s image online. ReputationDefender, a Silicon Valley technology firm, is hoping that this year the market will finally fulfil its potential.

Reputation has 1.6m customers. For $99 a year or more they get a basic “reputation starter” package, which monitors when they are mentioned online and alerts them if anything sensitive comes up, such as “your real age, name, address, mugshots, legal disputes or marital problems”. For $5,000 a year, the firm will “combat misleading or inaccurate links from your top search results” (most people do not look at results much below the top page or two).

The problem has been to create a profitable business. Although there has long been evidence of growing unease about online privacy, getting anyone to pay for greater control of their image has proved difficult. “A lot of companies have started with idealism about empowering the online user, only to find that the user wouldn’t pay,” says Esther Dyson, a technology investor, who nonetheless remains optimistic that this will change.

Michael Fertik, Reputation’s 34-year-old founder, thinks the change is now happening, helped along by several recent deals. In January Reputation acquired Reputation 24/7, a British competitor. It also began a partnership with Equifax, one of America’s big three consumer-credit monitoring firms, offering Equifax’s customers free access to Reputation’s basic online identity-monitoring and clean-up services. TransUnion Interactive, a competitor of Equifax, will roll out a similar arrangement with Reputation in the spring.

The next step is to launch a data vault—like a bank vault containing all the data that constitute a person’s reputation. It is the most important step in Mr Fertik’s idea not merely to give people more power over their data but to “invert the basic business model of the internet”. The current business model, as he describes it, is that giant firms give customers something free, collect data on them without their knowledge and sell it to third parties to do with whatever they like. “We want to turn it on its head, by [letting] the consumer… decide if they want to sell information about themselves to companies that want to get to know them.”

The upstart firms face some technology problems. Reputation is making progress in some areas, such as how to ensure the person whose online presence is being monitored is actually the person you think he or she is. But the biggest challenge is to find enough buyers and sellers to create a marketplace potentially worth billions. Mr Fertik reckons critical mass will come at around 10m individual customers and around 50 companies keen to pay for access to their data vaults.

Not everyone is convinced consumers will go for this. One boss at Microsoft argues that most people will find managing personal data too complex and that in practice online privacy will be secured by regulation, not products. In the past couple of years more firms have started to accept that personal data will be protected more strongly than before, whether by regulation—which is likely to be tightened in Europe and America—or through market mechanisms like those envisaged by Mr Fertik. Indeed, the data vault may usher in the sort of market-based solutions that “might discourage heavier regulation by Congress, where protecting privacy is one of the few genuinely bipartisan causes,” says Jon Leibowitz, the (outgoing) chairman of America’s Federal Trade Commission. “ReputationDefender is very far ahead of the curve in trying to give consumers some control over their data,” he adds.

Reputation is not alone, though. It competes with a host of start-ups, from personal.com to mydex. Another firm, Snapchat, is tackling the problem at its source by allowing people to send photos to friends that erase themselves shortly after being viewed. Some big firms, including banks and maybe even current internet giants, will probably enter the new market. Some may even offer to buy Reputation. Mr Fertik is not fazed. His firm has the advantage of that most valuable thing, which it must protect at all costs: a good reputation.

Original article: http://www.economist.com/news/business/21572240-market-protected-personal-information-about-take-price-reputation/print

ReputationDefender's CEO and Founder Michael Fertik explains how 'weblining' could affect your ability to get health care, insurance, a job and more.  Watch here.

Packing a powerful presence online is about more than what you should do–sometimes it’s also about what you need to stop doing.  

Here are five major missteps that are worth double-checking: 

1. The overshare 

Your Facebook account doesn’t pull double duty as a confessional. Twitter? It’s not a 140-character version of Dr. Phil. Leave the highly personal subjects for when you’re actually in person–with your friends and family. There are far too many instances where a story or anecdote, seemingly harmless, sucker-punches your small business, employment status, or romantic life. Don’t become a cautionary tale. 

2. The start-and-stop 

Congratulations, you’ve started your first blog! It’s fun, right? Fast-forward a few weeks and the blog that seemed like enjoyable evidence of your Web savvy is the digital equivalent of a New Year’s diet resolution: You’re so over it. It’s hard to feed the content beast–and even tougher to do it well. If you’re not committed, take your blog down. Or, investigate a faster, lower-effort option (Tumblr, anyone?) and stick with it. 

3. No company website 

Did you know that about 75 percent of businesses in the U.S. do not have a website? And it’s not a phenomenon unique to America: 60 percent of U.K. small businesses don’t either. What gives? A Harris Interactive survey says that 78 percent of adults in the U.S. think it’s very important to look up information about companies before deciding to do business with them. So what does it say to potential customers when you’re MIA? 

4. A lackluster website 

Are you one of the savvy-few small businesses that have embraced a Web presence? Congratulations. But is your site all that it could be? It’s not enough to claim your online real estate–like real life, you have to develop it to maximize its value. You don’t necessarily need to hire an expensive Web designer, but you should make sure your site is aesthetically pleasing, easy to navigate, and up to date. 

5. The duck-and-cover 

Sometimes, people say things you just don’t want to hear. When it’s in person, you have the option to just walk away. On the Internet, when it’s about your business, you simply don’t have the luxury to cover your eyes and shut your ears. Whether it’s a post on your Facebook page, an angry "DM" on Twitter, or an irate review, pay attention. Knowledge is power, and knowing what your customers have to say about you gives you the energy and opportunity to make a difference for your business.

Original article: http://www.inc.com/michael-fertik/5-mistakes-youre-making-online_Printer_Friendly.html