Wild West 2.0: How to Protect and Restore Your Online Reputation on the Untamed Social Frontier

82

Google Gone Wild:

The Digital Threat

to Reputation

In an ideal world, anyone searching for information about you

would find a fair description of who you are and what you do, with-

out too much about your personal life being revealed to complete

strangers. Unfortunately, we do not live in an ideal world. Even with-

out any malicious attacks, thousands of reputations are ruined by

negligent mistakes, sloppy programming, bad luck, and the structure

of the Internet itself. These dangers manifest themselves many ways:

Google’s search algorithm unintentionally dredges up false informa-

tion and emphasizes negative information; blog authors negligently

repeat incomplete truths; researchers fail to search deeply enough to

get a full picture; and technology echoes and repeats the most scan-

dalous facts.

CHAPTER

83Google Gone Wild: The Digital Threat to Reputation

Google Gone Wild

Justice is blind, but search engines are

blind, deaf, and dumb.

—FOLK ADAGE ADAPTED TO FIT MODERN REALITY

Almost all popular websites are automated. They are run by com-

puter software that does not need human intervention for most ac-

tions. A bank’s website uses a computer program that automatically

tells you how much money is in your account without a bank em-

ployee ever lifting a finger. An e-commerce website uses a computer

program to tell you what items are in stock and to process your pay-

ment without the need for a cashier to do anything. And a search en-

gine—like Google or Microsoft Bing—uses a computer program to

figure out what websites to return for your search query without a

human editor reviewing the results.

The system usually works because computers are incredibly

smart. When properly programmed, computers can perform literally

billions of calculations in a second. Computers can store more in-

formation on a disk the size of a deck of cards than could ever fit in

books in a public library. And computers can perform the most bor-

ing tasks day in and day out without ever tiring or needing a break.

But the system sometimes fails because computers are also in-

credibly dumb. Computers do exactly what they are told to do, no

more and no less. Computers do not ask whether their instructions

make sense. Computers do not consider other ways to perform the

same task. A computer has no empathy or emotions, nor any sense of

fairness or justice. If a computer is programmed to return the most

popular links in response to a search, then it will return the most

popular links even if they are obviously wrong, unfair, or harmful.

And computers interpret absolutely everything completely literally;

the fictional “Johnny 5” of the movie Short Circuit is perhaps the only

computer in history that “got” a joke.

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