3 ms·

> are charging people like $500 a pop to "remove damaging information from Google results." And ALL THEY DO is fill out that form for free. Someone tried to haw

by gist 5y ago

> are charging people like $500 a pop to "remove damaging information from Google results." And ALL THEY DO is fill out that form for free. Someone tried to hawk this service to my husband after he came under attack. 'ALL THEY DO' is what anyone does in a similar way. You are paying for what they know that you don't know how to do. There is nothing wrong or deceptive about making money in this way. (use of 'all they do' seems to imply this). Plenty of people are busy and willing to pay for things to have someone else handle the details. Google could easily publicize this but they choose not to. Here is the thing. Someone charging $500 (or any amount) has already filtered people that feel they have a real need from everyone attempting to do similar. Now you could argue the fee should be less but the friction caused by that higher fee (for those who can afford it) is worth it. And those that can't can do research and effort (like with anything) to find a way to achieve the same. People often expect everything to be free and nobody to make money off of knowledge. By the way if reputation managers are charging $500 nothing to prevent someone from doing the same for less and changing the market price. Also I'd image the rep managers possibly massage some things to get the job done something many people wouldn't know or want to do.

crispyambulance 5y ago
> There is nothing wrong or deceptive about making money in this way. Absolutely incorrect. It's more complicated and insidious than your reductive argument suggests. These reputation "management" companies are also the ones who scrape public records on a massive scale and DELIBERATELY place this data really high up in search rankings. So, casual searches for someone's name often end up returning vague negative results like "xxx has a criminal record, find out more!". They ALSO spam people at internet scale and warn them about their "reputation" and how they can "fix" it. In other words, they provide the "cure" for the "injury" which they've caused. One of the worst and biggest of these piece of sh*t companies is mylife.com. They do the web-scraping and the SEO to get their results up high, AND ALSO charge money to "clean up" reputations. It happens to be legal in the USA because we're in a downward spiral of techno-feudalism, but it's a vile and dishonorable practice. The founder of mylife.com, Jeffery Tinsely, has become wealthy from these deceptive practices. He faces regular lawsuits (eg https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-2020/website-sued-mylife.html https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-2020/website-sue...). But somehow mylife.com continues to survive presumably by raking in the cash as well as VC investment (not sure if it was mylife or one of the other slimy companies run by Tinsely). FWIW, it is possible to remove your results from mylife.com. I did it. It requires a phone call and some firm persistence and patience. You call them on the phone and talk to someone at an Indian call center. Just say that you want to remove your name from mylife.com searches. It costs nothing but they WILL try to sell you their junk reputation management service with boiler-room-like intensity (worse than Verizon or Comcast), just decline for the 2 dozen times they ask. In the end it worked, I am no longer searchable on mylife.com and no mylife.com results show up on google under my name, but I get several emails a day from these MF's telling me that my reputation needs fixing and that "other people can see it". There's other companies like this. Mylife is particularly slimy but it's the biggest.
- gist 5y ago
  You've made good points but they are not related to what I am discussing which is someone charging $500 (if that is the price) to get information off google that google will do (apparently per OP) if you knew the right form. Anyone knowing the 'right form and place to find it' can charge a price and offer a service. This is quite different than what you are describing that reputation management companies do.

by gist 5y ago

crispyambulance 5y ago

> There is nothing wrong or deceptive about making money in this way. Absolutely incorrect. It's more complicated and insidious than your reductive argument suggests. These reputation "management" companies are also the ones who scrape public records on a massive scale and DELIBERATELY place this data really high up in search rankings. So, casual searches for someone's name often end up returning vague negative results like "xxx has a criminal record, find out more!". They ALSO spam people at internet scale and warn them about their "reputation" and how they can "fix" it. In other words, they provide the "cure" for the "injury" which they've caused. One of the worst and biggest of these piece of sh*t companies is mylife.com. They do the web-scraping and the SEO to get their results up high, AND ALSO charge money to "clean up" reputations. It happens to be legal in the USA because we're in a downward spiral of techno-feudalism, but it's a vile and dishonorable practice. The founder of mylife.com, Jeffery Tinsely, has become wealthy from these deceptive practices. He faces regular lawsuits (eg https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-2020/website-sued-mylife.html https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-2020/website-sue...). But somehow mylife.com continues to survive presumably by raking in the cash as well as VC investment (not sure if it was mylife or one of the other slimy companies run by Tinsely). FWIW, it is possible to remove your results from mylife.com. I did it. It requires a phone call and some firm persistence and patience. You call them on the phone and talk to someone at an Indian call center. Just say that you want to remove your name from mylife.com searches. It costs nothing but they WILL try to sell you their junk reputation management service with boiler-room-like intensity (worse than Verizon or Comcast), just decline for the 2 dozen times they ask. In the end it worked, I am no longer searchable on mylife.com and no mylife.com results show up on google under my name, but I get several emails a day from these MF's telling me that my reputation needs fixing and that "other people can see it". There's other companies like this. Mylife is particularly slimy but it's the biggest.

gist 5y ago
You've made good points but they are not related to what I am discussing which is someone charging $500 (if that is the price) to get information off google that google will do (apparently per OP) if you knew the right form. Anyone knowing the 'right form and place to find it' can charge a price and offer a service. This is quite different than what you are describing that reputation management companies do.