MONITORING YOUR ONLINE REPUTATION
(Part 1)
A discussion with Richard Matta
002 - Richard Matta
Rich came to ReputationDefender from Support.com, a leading provider of cloud software and services for technology support, where he was a key member of the early founding team that grew the company to a $100M run rate by 2013. Previously, Rich held multiple leadership and executive roles in product management and engineering at SupportSoft (now part of Aptean), culminating in the successful sale of the business in 2009.
Talking Points
- Learn about ‘The Right to be Forgotten’ campaign and a person’s right to privacy
- How the EU (European Union) privacy guideline principles can be laid down in the USA
- The number one tip small business owners should be looking for in the ‘Right to be Forgotten’ movement
John DeBevoise:Greetings everyone and welcome to another serving of Business Soup Talk Radio. If it’s in business, it’s Business Soup. I’m your host John DeBevoise. Today we have from Reputation Defender, Rich Matta. We’re going to be talking about the rather controversial movement known as right to be forgotten. Rich, what is the right to be forgotten?
Rich Matta :The right to be forgotten is a campaign that we’ve launched at righttobeforgotten.org. You can sign the petition. It’s really our call for some legislation, federal legislation in the United States similar to what’s been done in Europe several years ago to give Americans the opportunity to remove from Google and from certain internet platforms certain information that should be considered private, that doesn’t really matter to the public and is having an impact on their business or their life or their livelihood.
John DeBevoise:What is the genesis of this movement?
Rich Matta :We at Reputation Defender, we’re seeing all kinds of difficult cases where people had old and inaccurate information about them on the internet. And the only solution was really what we can offer them, which is suppressing that information, pushing it down, and it takes time and it’s expensive. Sure, there’s always, there’s going to be plenty for us to do at Reputation Defender even with this legislation, but some of these cases just felt to us like it ought to be free. It ought to be a basic right for people not to know about that one time in college when somebody accused you of something maybe and you didn’t even do it, and it’s still sitting there 15, 20 years later on top of your Google search. Right? That didn’t feel right to us to charge someone for that kind of service.
John DeBevoise:Rich, if I’m a politician, it sounds like they could certainly use your service. If I’m accused of something, and there are a lot of accusations going about, as a politician, what can be done about those accusations, right or wrong? Let’s say they’re wrong.
Rich Matta :The right to be forgotten wouldn’t help with a case like that because a politician is in the public sphere. The view is even in Europe where they define this pretty broadly, the view is you’re a public facing individual. People are going to have opinions about you. You are protected to some degree by defamation law. If people are stating truly false things and that are also defamatory, hypothetically you could sue them. Politicians really are not affected by this. They have to recognize they’re in the public sphere. People are going to have lots of opinions about them, and they’re going to get attacks from both sides at times, and that’s just the course they’ve chosen.
John DeBevoise:On a broad spectrum, can you give us a general ballpark of what people would need to invest to take advantage of Reputation Defender as well as the right to be forgotten?
Rich Matta :Reputation Defender’s services run anywhere from a few thousand dollars a year all the way up to $25,000 a year, depending on the seriousness of the problem. Most cases are on the low end of that spectrum. For that amount of money, we’ll provide you with lots of professional content on the internet, a lot of profile sites, social media sites. We’ll do all the writing. We’ll optimize the technology so that it ranks well in Google. Similarly, if you want to manage online reviews and social media business directory listings, we have a software platform and that runs between a few thousand dollars and $5,000 a year as a subscription service. Just for clarity, right be forgotten is just an initiative. It’s not a service that we charge for. It’s sort of a PR platform for us to explain our views that we truly hold, that some of these cases shouldn’t cost people thousands of dollars to mediate. Right? But it’s just something we’re doing in the public interest. It’s not a service that we offer.
John DeBevoise:Is the right to be forgotten campaign, is that a campaign that is designed to step into Reputation Defender?
Rich Matta :That’s how we intend it. I mean, obviously we’re doing this in good faith. We think the legislation makes sense if defined correctly, but yeah, our idea is a lot of people would not be covered by this even in the best of all cases, and they’re going to come to know Reputation Defender through our advocacy for this important issue that so many Americans actually agree with. Right? Then they’ll be drawn into Reputation Defender’s services that they can probably use anyway.
John DeBevoise:Well, then it’s probably a way in which it’s a door to open up the fact that they may need it. Here it is. They read about it and they go, “Well, maybe I ought to be looking into this.” You can’t fault Reputation Defender for that direction.
Rich Matta :Right. The truth is I don’t know if this will fly. I mean, it is a tricky issue. As you brought up a few times in the interview, John, who gets to decide what’s free speech and when it’s personal and when it’s not? Right? Because obviously no one wants to suppress real free speech, but it’s like Google has become in the 24 years since the last … 22 years since the last time we passed any laws in this area, Google has become the de facto judge of free speech. Right? If it’s on page one of Google, they just point the finger to the algorithm like the CEO of Google did last week in front of Congress. “It’s not us, right? We’re not responsible.” That doesn’t change the fact that sometimes the algorithm screws it up. Right? It takes a machine to mess it up and a human affects it sometimes, and we think there ought to be a mechanism for humans to fix it when it’s just messy personal information the public really should not know.
John DeBevoise:They make a good point how the individuals such as Google are being able to act like God as it’s being exposed where they can direct the comments or the questions in a particular slant, and Congress was addressing that. I thought the best example was when they said, “Can you explain to me why when you search idiot, President Trump comes up?”
Rich Matta :Right, yeah. Look, I don’t work at Google, and I’m not sure exactly what goes on behind their walls, but what they said is it’s the algorithm. It just happens. There’s over 200 factors that feed into the algorithm, and out of that comes a set of search results. It’s a very software engineering answer from the CEO of Google. I’m not going to get into whether, to what degree that might be true or not, but the problem is we’re concerned about the average individual too. President Trump can take it, whatever’s coming, but this is affecting Main Street America and people with businesses on Main Street America. Right? It’s those little, I don’t want to call them little, it’s the everyday person that we care about with this initiative. The person that is unfairly being smeared by information that’s out there or negative and embarrassing or a negative first impression is being cast on them for something that really the general public doesn’t have a right to know.
John DeBevoise:Well, algorithms are just an abstract of chaos math, and you’re giving an object such as the color blue, you’re giving it a number because you cannot do a chaos math calculation or an algorithm without assigning it a number. Well, you can manipulate those numbers just as you can manipulate reputations online just by a slight modification of a number as you apply it in chaos math. You can blame everything on the algorithm because it’s nothing but a mathematical equation.
Rich Matta :It is an easy convenient answer I suppose.
John DeBevoise:It is. When questions come up, Rich, in the future about this, we’d like to give you an invitation to come back on Business Soup when we have questions about what’s going on in the internet and business defense. If we get any comments from our audience, we’ll forward them on to you and maybe make a show out of it as well.
Rich Matta :I’d love to do that.
John DeBevoise:All right. Rich, thank you so much.
Rich Matta :All right. Thank you.
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