The Official Intelius Blog

When Self-Regulation Works, Your Privacy Is In Good Hands

dstewart — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 20:42:48 +0000

Despite the ongoing discussions about online privacy by legislatures, regulators, and data conservationists — self-regulation remains the primary tool to ensure consumer information is handled responsibly. And rightly so.

Too often, privacy debates devolve into false dichotomies, dominated by arguments that advocate for being always anonymous or that privacy is dead. Both are wrong. Online privacy continues to be an important conversation because we humans are both social and autonomous creatures. And, we need solutions that balance values of both disclosure and discretion. The U.S. founders knew that.

Through products and services, the technology industry is well positioned to address the weighty nuances of deciphering public from private places, understanding who uses what products, and how those products might be abused.

But although industry might be best positioned to address privacy issues, they have no monopoly on them. Privacy is a team sport. As I discussed in my talk at the recent Privacy Identity Innovation conference, technologists drive innovation. But responsible innovation is only achieved when tempered with the counsel (and sometimes warnings) of humanitarians — philosophers, journalists, economists, anthropologists, and historians. And, where appropriate, this counsel must be heeded and enforced, either voluntarily through self-regulation or involuntarily by law.

Self-regulation is simply the most efficient way to protect consumers and encourage innovation. Let me break it down:

Self-regulation adapts better than government regulation
The process of creating, passing, implementing, sustaining and auditing government regulation is, as you can imagine, quite long. Congress has attempted comprehensive privacy legislation for years. While the FTC has been effective at prosecuting offenders recently, it just can’t give consumers the protections they need and the innovation they want. Self-regulation is fast. Privacy companies, like TRUSTe, can verify the claims of their clients and operate at the speed of technology.
Self-regulation offers solutions to actual problems
By allowing industry to self-regulate, innovation is prioritized alongside consumer protection — not innovation at the expense of consumer protection. We tend to forget how new the Internet is and, to some extent, that we are all making this up as we go.
Self-regulation encourages a race to the top
Industry players vie for users. Winning companies offer the best products and are most responsive to all stakeholders including customers, advocates, and regulators. Take, for example, Intelius’ work with the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV). Working with NNEDV, we developed a suppression feature in TrueRep which offers users the opportunity to block their most recent contact information (my take here).
Self-regulation fits with Privacy-by-Design (PbD)
By accommodating for privacy early in the design process, users can have just-in-time controls over their data. PbD was one of the driving forces for our TrueRep product where users have access and control of their own public profile.
Self-regulation addresses data abuses
The fiercest enemy of consumer privacy is data abuse. Sure, data abuse can’t be accomplished without access to the data. But where data is already public, it shouldn’t be used for harm. That’s the wisdom of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. No matter how the data is accessed, businesses must tread carefully when it’s used for sensitive purposes like hiring or housing.

We humans are complex. As we map our complex society online, getting privacy right will take some time. Self-regulation is a key ingredient to responsible, fast-paced innovation. Give it a chance.

More from Jim Adler
Chief Privacy Officer, Intelius

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Privacy Identity Innovation Conference 2012: The Emergent Privacy Industrial Complex

glynch — Tue, 22 May 2012 16:56:49 +0000

The Privacy Identity Innovation (pii) conference is THE eclectic gathering of wonks, geeks, and suits. Seattle was lucky to host the third pii event last week. pii was lucky to score the most beautiful weather Seattle has offered since last September. I was lucky enough to attend and participate. Win-win-win.

I’ll be recapping the pii 2012 conference with Hibe’s Brendan Charles on Tuesday’s #PrivChat (topics here) at 12 pm EDT/9 am PDT. Please join.

A Growing Privacy-Industrial Complex

The theme of my pii lightning talk was a call for balance amidst a growing privacy-industrial complex (slides, video) — a term first coined by Jeff Jarvis last year. The privacy industry is comprised of professionals from legal, compliance, risk, ethics, audit, security, and operations. Since 2000, it has been growing at nearly 50% annually; growth that would make any CEO blush.

Sure, privacy professionals are certainly necessary but hardly sufficient to guide us through this burgeoning era of social media. Their background is often too specialized and too isolated from where technical innovation occurs. Privacy professionals need to be agile across the entire organization and have a strong voice throughout the product lifecycle. Archimedes said, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.” That stand can’t only be in the General Counsel’s office.

Also, as President Eisenhower warned with regard to the military-industrial complex, there’s a risk of survival bias. So, as privacy regulations grow in complexity, more privacy professionals will be needed. For example, how much work has been created to understand and comply with the new E.U. Cookie Directive that can be enforced starting May 26? Why must every privacy nail be hit with a regulatory hammer?

The Pursuit of Balance

The metaphor for my talk, was Da Vinci’s iconic Vitruvian Man. The proportioned body, tender heart, and insightful mind of Vitruvius offers interesting parallels into the struggles we’re facing in the privacy world today.

The technologist is the forceful arms and legs that drive innovation. The humanitarian — philosopher, journalist, economist, anthropologist, economist, and historian — is the heart that tempers the restless drive to innovate. And, it is the mind, which must balance the body and the heart. But balance is not a condition, it’s a pursuit like the one we know from that peculiar Epicurean phrase in the Declaration of Independence: “pursuit of happiness”.

In his 1967 treatise Privacy and Freedom, Alan Westin said: “Each individual is continually engaged in a personal adjustment process in which he balances the desire for privacy with the desire for disclosure and communication of himself to others.” Prescient.

A Balanced Discourse…

Preceding my pii talk was Andrew Keen, whose new book Digital Vertigo, strikes just such a humanitarian chord. Andrew, in his interview with Larry Downes, described today’s technology as a MacGuffin — a literary device that drives the characters but not the plot. He argues that technology is driving us but we need to look through it in order to see where this plot is really going.

The following day, Microsoft’s Marc Davis talked about how we might move from digital feudalism to enlightenment by wrapping personal information in metadata to better control it within the public, joint, and private spheres — a subject I’ve written about here. Marc has proposed an information metadata system to move us into such a digital enlightenment. Might this be a step in the right direction?

Marc challenged my contention that privacy might never be solved (see my comments on the Data Protection panel at ~10:12). Well, even though no one has proven that privacy is an NP-hard problem, I stand by my statement that privacy is very complex because people are complex (and their language is, too).

The discourse also included a lively exchange on Twitter at #pii2012. Check it out.

#pii2012 Final Thoughts

As Larry Lessig taught us, “Code is Law”. And since the law encodes our society’s values, technology’s code and humanity’s values are deeply intertwined. We can’t separate them any more than we can separate our body from our mind from our heart.

pii has proven a great venue for spirited, informed, and respectful debate. Too often, we fall into this gotcha, zero-sum game of ad hominem attacks and scare tactics that does a disservice to the profound journey we’re on. Impassioned argument is the friction that sharpens the ax of progress. If we are to find a wise path forward, this discourse between technologists and humanitarians must continue.

More from Jim Adler
Chief Privacy Officer, Intelius

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Privacy: A Transatlantic Culture Clash

glynch — Fri, 04 May 2012 16:26:13 +0000

The difference between European and American privacy approaches is typically framed as E.U. aspiration versus U.S. pragmatism:

The E.U. views privacy as a source “right of personality” versus the U.S. mosaic of privacy torts;
the E.U. has comprehensive, federal law versus U.S. spotty, sectoral statutes; and
the E.U. has spotty enforcement at the nation-state level versus U.S. rigorous enforcement through private right of action, state enforcement through attorneys general, and federal regulation through the Federal Trade Commission.

As Don Cohn has said, “hell on earth is E.U. law and U.S. enforcement.” There’s some truth to these characterizations, but they miss the point. The E.U. and U.S. simply disagree on the priority of two key cultural values, disclosure and discretion — that is, freedoms of the public (i.e., speech, press, assembly) and freedoms of the person (i.e., equal treatment, privacy). We get mired in technocratic detail without recognizing this fundamental cultural difference.

Last week, the European data protection authorities came to Silicon Valley to discuss access and use of online personal data. The clash of values, between rights of the public and rights of the private, could not be more clear. At the Berkeley Law Privacy Forum, Peter Hustinx (European Data Protection Supervisor) said:

“When data have been published or have been shared and it is within your [company’s] power to get them back, you have to make reasonable effort to get the spirit back in the bottle.”

Mr. Hustinx seems to be saying that even if information is published, there’s an obligation to re-cloak it. For example, if two Twitter users get into a heated fight (hey, it happens), and both agree to delete their exchange, Twitter should make “reasonable effort to get the spirit back in the bottle” and delete the tweets. But what if these public tweets are retweeted far and wide? Does Twitter have the obligation to delete them, too? I don’t think so.

What is noticeably absent from this point of view is the public’s right to history, knowledge, and lessons learned. Sure, a public fight often results in public humiliation of the combatants (or at least the loser), and they want to erase the experience from the public record. That’s a mistake. Many of life’s lessons have been learned by witnessing (or sometimes engaging in) playground, barroom, and online fights.

What’s more, the duty to have our public mistakes remembered isn’t just important to our social fabric, it’s a key ingredient to technology innovation. Entrepreneurs aren’t deterred by risking the embarrassment that comes with public failure. To paraphrase famed marketer Geoffrey Moore, please fail publicly so we can learn from your humiliation. We’ll forgive you and thank you.

More from Jim Adler
Chief Privacy Officer, Intelius

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Strata 2012: Is Privacy a Big Data Prison?

glynch — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 20:38:06 +0000

I just returned from O’Reilly Media’s latest soiree, StrataConf 2012: Making Data Work. My panel, If Data Wants to Be Free, is Privacy a Prison? focused on design frameworks for “responsible innovation” to guide data professionals through the perilous territory of data collection, access, and usage. Yeah, I know, ambitious …

I was joined by privacy researcher and NYU doctoral student Solon Barocas [BTW, can’t help but plug Solon’s doctoral chair, Helen Nissenbaum, who had a significant influence on the recent White House Privacy Framework]. Solon tempered my pragmatic, more libertarian perspective with deep thinking—a good combo I think. The session was moderated by the multi-tasker Alex Howard of O’Reilly Media, who was able to keep Solon and I on task and take audience questions from Twitter. Impresssive. You can see the real-time audience discussion on the Twitter #strataprivacy hashtag.

In an effort to steer the privacy conversation away from its predominant (though distracting) themes of data collection and access, fears of a future dystopia, and the complexities of law, our discussion began by examining the implications of big data gaffes through real-world use-cases. Using the Places-Players-Perils Framework lens to focus the cases, we discussed how societal norms should be mapped to the growing power of big data.

And boy, did we have a bunch of recent gaffes, flubs and faux pas to choose from. Take for example, the case of the two cheeky British tourists who were denied entrance into the U.S. for (if only in jest) threats. Or, the FBI cutting back GPS surveillance in the wake of the Supreme Court’s US v Jones decision. Or, that Target knows a teen is pregnant before her parents do. Or, the unification of Google’s services which links all user information across all accounts. Is this 2012 or 1984?

In all seriousness, big data pros can stay off privacy third rails and out of the headlines with a little thought and sensitivity. For example, in the Target teen pregnancy case, Solon made the point that Target could have just asked customers if they wanted coupons during their pregnancy. If the data analysts would have thought about how personal pregnancy is, they simply would have asked. After all, targeted coupons when expecting a kitchen remodel is bit less sensitive than when expecting expecting. Duh.

Even processing of public data can lead to discovery of private information. In fact, from the audience, Daniel Tunkelang asked the provocative question whether the inference of private facts from public data is a new definition of thoughtcrime? BTW, Daniel has a good Strata wrap up today on his blog.

The spontaneous emergence of these weighty issues is why data professionals need shorthand ways to easily think about the societal impact of their work. Such a framework would need to go beyond default “procedural protections” (like the Fair Information Practice Principles) to “substantive protections” that evaluate possible product impact at design-time and track actual impact as the product moves into the market.

More from Jim Adler
Chief Privacy Officer

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A New Era of Giving Back: Skills Based Volunteering

glynch — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 19:21:21 +0000

In today’s difficult economy, charitable giving is a reduced priority for people, some of whom are struggling to pay their own bills. As an alternative, some are choosing to volunteer their time instead of giving cash. Taking this concept a step further is the explosive growth of skills-based volunteering, that is, leveraging one’s specialized skills and talents to help nonprofits achieve their missions.

Examples of skills-based volunteering include teaching a class, painting a mural, designing a website, financial advising, and so on. Volunteers provide free work-related knowledge and expertise in skills they would normally receive compensation for.

At the forefront of the skills-based volunteering movement are organizations like Points of Light Institute and Taproot Foundation. These organizations lead, mobilize and engage professionals in pro bono service that drives social change. They encourage professionals skilled in design, technology, marketing, human resources and strategy to donate their skills and help out nonprofits at no cost.

If you’re looking for more reasons to put your skills to use for a good cause, take this into consideration:

While the average hour of traditional volunteering is valued by the independent sector at between $18–20 an hour, skills-based volunteering is valued at $40–500 an hour depending on the market value of the time.
The down economy means nonprofits are stretched thin and hard-pressed for much needed specific expertise. Skilled volunteers are needed more than ever.
It’s a great way to develop workplace skills and gain experience in other industries.

This growing trend is being especially embraced in corporate America, where employee volunteer programs have been a part of corporate culture for decades. Skills based volunteering is an innovative concept, and we at Intelius plan to jump on the bandwagon of this new era of giving back!

Let us know about your experience with skills based volunteering by visiting our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/intelius

Gina Lynch
Community Relations

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Know What Online Safety Means to You

glynch — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 22:50:33 +0000

You hear it all the time – “Online Security” and “Staying safe on-line” – but what does it mean beyond the headline? Well, the truth is that the answer is varied and complex. For companies, it means huge budgets, teams of dedicated professionals, and high-tech security devices to protect their (and in many cases your own) data. For individuals it can mean anything from running the latest spyware hunters, advanced and intensive anti-virus, or even alternative operating systems to simply keeping your computer updated and knowing what to avoid.

Where you are in this spectrum is a decision that only you can make, but there are some things you can do to ensure that you are staying safe no matter where you are. Below is a list of several things that are important for even the most security-minded among us do well to remember and practice. Sometimes we’re even the ones who need to be reminded of these basics the most!

Know your anti-virus solution. While it’s still critical to have anti-virus on your computer, it is now more important than ever to be familiar with your particular anti-virus. Anti-virus programs range in cost, effectiveness, and features. The purposes of this post is not to analyze or evaluate these different solutions (there is already a plethora of articles on the Internet evaluating all of these factors) but to stress the importance of knowing what your program looks like. One of the most common (and effective) infection methods today is to present you with a fake anti-virus console. These “Fake AV” programs typically present themselves as your anti-virus (or sometimes a “better” AV program) claiming to have found a number of infections on your system and offering to clean them for you if you install them. They sometimes only hope to charge you to download their program, but others will infect your computer and refuse to return control until you pay them. Some of these fake programs are so highly polished that they look as good (or better!) than real anti-virus solutions. Make sure you know what the interface of your AV looks like so that you can spot fakes!
Patch it like it’s a quilt! This may seem obvious – updates are good, right? They also happen so often these days that they can interrupt your work flow. Whether it’s your browser (Firefox, Chrome, IE, etc.), your operating systems (Windows, Mac, Ubuntu, so on), or regular applications like Adobe or Java, the correct answer to “Would you like to apply these updates?” is always yes! And the most appropriate time to do them is right away. This may seem reactionary, but it’s important to remember that there is a thriving market for unpatched vulnerabilities. By the time a vendor (Microsoft, Adobe, Mozilla, etc.) has issued the patch that you’re being nagged about the weakness or flaw that it fixes has probably been known about by the bad guys for weeks (or in some cases months) before. It interrupts your e-mail, surfing, and even work sometimes but it’s a negligible interruption when compared to the impact of a real infection or attack.

Ben Sauls
Senior Information Security Engineer

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Our Online Footprint

glynch — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 20:55:09 +0000

A buzz-worthy phrase of late has been ‘Your online footprint.’ Google alerts are filled with this concept and hit our inbox each afternoon with new information on the implications of our ‘online footprint.’ But do consumers really have an understanding of how much of their information is available online? Or for that matter do they know how to manage it?

Imagine this, as a teenager in early-2000 you signed up for MySpace. You added all your friends, interests and information to this page. When you got into college you were over the moon that Facebook would be available to you. Even before moving into your dorm you have your contact information, friends list and personal information stocked and your wall is full of friends posting about the most personal details.

Late in college and in your early career you’d like a place for your professional information (LinkedIn), a place to share your interests (Pinterest), a place to share your most embarrassing music interests (Spotify), a place to show what place you’re at (Foursquare) and heck how about a place to update people on what you’re doing at the place you’re at (Twitter.) It is not uncommon for a normal twenty something to have their information plastered on 7-8 massive social networks.

A common misconception online is that this information is protected. The problem is with many of these networks it’s easy to miss or simply forget about the basic privacy settings provided which can allow any stranger to see any information you’ve provided. This is a can of worms we’d prefer to remain closed.

With this and many other thoughts in mind Intelius has developed TrueRep. TrueRep is a unique, innovative new product that helps answer the question, how do I manage my ‘online footprint?’

TrueRep is designed to help you:

Learn what information is available about you online.
Control your privacy by giving you the option to suppress your most recent contact information from appearing on Intelius websites.
Track and manage your online reputation through TrueRep's proprietary Reputation Score.
Add explanatory comments to background checks that others may order on you from Intelius websites.

It’s a reality that our information is spread throughout the web and it’s up to us to corral it, understand and control it. TrueRep for the first time allows users to have access to their information in one central location. Your ‘online footprint’ suddenly doesn’t seem so daunting.

-Ian Dinsmore

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The Good, The Bad, and The Unknown: Data Privacy Day 2012 at the Churchill Club

glynch — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 18:22:29 +0000

This year, Data Privacy Day stretched into Data Privacy Week. I celebrated by participating in a Churchill Club panel on The Collection of Online Consumer Data: The Good, The Bad, and The Unknown. The discussion centered on consumer interest in protecting personal data and the importance of striking the right balance between regulation and innovation. January has been such a busy month for data privacy issues that we had several recent events to noodle…

First, there was the SOPA kerfuffle which resulted in the withdrawl of the legislation. My take here.

Then, in U.S. v Jones, the Supreme Court of the United States decided that the government cannot attach tracking devices to your personal effects, like your car. Expect more privacy cases given the concurrences by Justice Sotomayor and Justice Alito on the reasonable expectation of privacy when third-parties handle your data.

Then, Google announced a new privacy policy which says they’ll be unifying all your information across all Google services, including search, emails, and calendars to deliver more “intuitive” results. The automatic opt-in feature means that the cost of non-participation means dragging yourself back to Yahoo!, bing or *gasp* AOL for email and search. Needless to say, the announcement is causing quite a stir.

Then, as if Microsoft and Google were coordinating, Microsoft Trustworthy Computing released survey data saying that everything you do online from “responding to emails and texts to clicking the ‘like’ and ‘retweet’ buttons on favorite Web pages, uploading photos and making purchases online” contributes to the creation of your online reputation.

Then, the EU proposed a massive overhaul of their data protection laws, which is troubling for a number of reasons. Chief among my concerns is the oversimplification of privacy policies; an attempt to export their privacy regime outside the EU; and their attempt to create a right to be forgotten which could collide with our right to know. The tension between competing values, like disclosure and discretion is something I discussed last summer.

Then, the U.S. Commerce Department and FTC promised two separate communiqués on U.S. privacy policy before February 1st. FTC Commissioner Julie Brill participated in Facebook’s Privacy Day webcast and noted the agency’s continued interest in privacy audits for past offenders like Google and Facebook. Commissioner Brill also called upon data brokers to share personal, public data with consumers and offer them an opportunity to correct or amend inaccurate information. TrueRep, an Intelius service, allows just that—awareness and control of your own public information (more here).

So, we had much to chew on at the Churchill Club event. Check out the video:

The panel was moderated by Jules Polonetsky (Co-chair and Director, Future of Privacy Forum) and featured Nick Bicanic (CEO and Founder, Echoecho Media), Jules Cohen (Director of Online Privacy, Microsoft), Nicole Ozer (Technology and Civil Liberties Policy Director, ACLU of Northern California), Paul Schwartz (Faculty Director, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, UC Berkeley).

More from Jim Adler
Chief Privacy Officer

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The Importance of Living in the Know

glynch — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 23:40:22 +0000

I made a small but embarrassing mistake recently. I wasn’t sure about the correct use of an uncommon pronoun, so I looked it up on a major search engine. The first result was from a reliable website, and it showed a definition that supported my use of the pronoun. It wasn’t until later, when my manager questioned the usage, that I actually went to the website and saw what hadn’t been visible in search results: that pronoun had been obsolete for almost five hundred years.

Oops.

This anecdote illustrates one of the dangers we all face online: as we navigate the Internet superhighway faster and faster, often paying less and less attention to the details of the information we encounter, it is all too easy to miss critical context.

For me, the cost of doing this was a small error as a communications professional. But what if I’d been searching for a person, glanced at a search result from a credible source, and leapt to a conclusion about that individual? Or what if someone had done that to me? And what if the decision involved had potentially significant consequences—for example, whether or not to connect for professional networking or go out on a date?

You’ve read in recent posts about TrueRep, our new online reputation management service. My pitfall with the pronoun reinforced in my own mind the TrueRep message:

Know what others can find about you online.
Know what perception that information is likely to create.
Know how to manage that information and perception.

With TrueRep, we’ve not only given you unique and powerful tools to achieve these three goals, but we’ve taken it one industry-leading step further, and given VIP subscribers the capability to add remarks to background checks on themselves that others purchase from Intelius. These remarks offer the chance to provide context that can significantly alter how information is perceived—just as finding out that a word is obsolete provides important context.

Our message with TrueRep is really the same one that we’ve chosen for Intelius: Live in the Know. Because you never know when someone may glance at a search result, or a people search or background check report, and leap to an erroneous conclusion. And the consequences of doing so may be far greater than using a Shakespearean pronoun during the Information Age.

Elisabeth DeVos
Marketing Communications Manager

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TrueRep: Why It’s Important

glynch — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 20:09:59 +0000

TrueRep represents a new category of personal analytics within online reputation management. It aims to give you fine-grained awareness and control of public information about you. Your reputation lies at the intersection of the public information available about you and how others perceive that information. You have little say over the latter. But you should be the first to know about your own public information, not the last. The idea behind TrueRep is to give you this awareness and control.

Beyond just detailing the virtues of TrueRep, I thought it might be interesting, for the more privacy wonkish among us, to discuss a de facto stab at Privacy by Design. It turns out that “the community” both inside and outside Intelius had (and is having) a profound influence on TrueRep. So, here’s a glimpse of the TrueRep story so far.

I Can See Myself

A key confirmation of the TrueRep vision came while I was attending a PrivacyCamp unconference in May 2010. After the day’s work of exploring privacy technology, data portability, and privacy rights, we adjourned for happy hour (and more discussion of privacy technology, data portability, and privacy rights).

Over a happy hour beer, I got to talking to Sally Applin, a senior UX designer and social anthropologist. Years ago, Sally noticed that successful software products seemed to contain a combination of “voyeurism and narcissism,” as people not only liked to look at others, but at themselves as well. As she explained this to me, Sally observed that the products from Intelius seemed to be more voyeuristic — and had little appeal to those who were narcissistic and wanted to look at their own data. I think her comment ran along the lines of (and I’m paraphrasing), “Why does it cost me 50 bucks to see my own background check?” Touché, point taken.

Self-awareness of your own information is important. TrueRep offers a look at your own background check summary including address history, criminal records, and civil suits.

Control Yourself

When I joined Intelius in September 2008, I went on a listening tour of some privacy advocates to better understand their concerns. One of those privacy advocates was Cindy Southworth, Vice President of Development & Innovation at the National Network to End Domestic Violence.

In discussing what Intelius could do to better serve Cindy’s at-risk community, she pointedly asked “How about getting my women out of your data?” Point taken, and we got to work on Cindy’s request.

As we began to work through the details, challenges emerged. Victims of domestic violence generally don’t like to be on any list for any reason, and distribution of login PIN codes proved unwieldy to a network of hundreds of local shelters. Cindy suggested that it would be best to simply allow removal of the latest contact information with, of course, no indication that anything was removed. Quite brilliant.

The latest contact suppression feature has three advantages. First and foremost, it provides more safety because, without the latest contact info, the address trail runs cold, frustrating any stalking offender. Second, a full opt-out removal from the Intelius people search results would just force the offender to a competitive website to satisfy their search. Lastly (which elated the product guys), since this feature is offered to all users, it lives within the main product roadmap and doesn’t require any special product maintenance. The latest contact suppression feature is now offered to all TrueRep users and available under the TrueRep Privacy tab.

A Voice in the Wilderness

A friend of mine has a “criminal tresspassing” charge on his background check. He asked me if we could modify the offense description on his background check because it sounds pretty bad. It could be interpreted as something quite serious, like breaking-and-entering. As it turns out, he hopped the fence at a Rolling Stones show in the mid eighties. I told him we couldn’t change the description from how the county reports it. In exasperation he said, “It’s my report. Why can’t I have my side of the story heard?” Point taken.

TrueRep Remarks lets you weigh in on the records in your background check. So, when anyone pulls my friend’s rap sheet they’ll also see his take on a regrettable, but teachable moment, from his adolescent past. We’ve all got ‘em.

Takeaways

I think a key lesson to be drawn from the TrueRep product arc is that you can learn from everyone — your customers, colleagues, friends, academics, advocates, regulators, and even your toughest critics. On the frontier where social media meets real life, you grab wisdom wherever you can find it.

TrueRep is just getting started, but this 360-degree, personal analytics view of your own public information is profoundly important. It gives you a view on how others view you. It forms the basis of reputation. It’s the reality check we’ve used for millennia to build trusted relationships. In many ways, it’s what makes us human

More from Jim Adler

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