Meet Ronnie Segev. He’s a pianist. He also has called Priceline.com 215 times asking for a refund on a plane ticket. Allegedly the General Counsel of Priceline sent the cops after him and he went to jail for 40 hours. He wants everyone to forget about the incident. Thanks to yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, that’s not going to happen.
The WSJ article was all about how a cottage industry has sprung up to try and remove negative information about people and companies – or at least lower the placement of such items – on search engines:
“…a company called ReputationDefender Inc. that promises to help individuals “search and destroy” negative information about them on the Internet. Businesses and others have long employed so-called search-engine-optimization techniques to try to make themselves appear higher in Web-search results. Now services like ReputationDefender and DefendMyName are charging fees that can run into hundreds of dollars to help clients remove or downplay unflattering online information.
The companies cite success stories of customers who have buried snippy blog comments, embarrassing photos or critical mentions of their names. But, as [one client] found out, the services can’t wipe everything off the Internet, and their efforts can backfire. ReputationDefender sent a letter to political blog Positive Liberty asking it to remove [a client's] name from a critical entry on the grounds the post was “outdated and invasive.” Blogger Jason Kuznicki refused, and posted a new entry mocking the request. He says he “had a good laugh over it.”
ReputationDefender also sent a takedown request to Consumerist, a Gawker Media blog that had written about a man who was briefly jailed for harassment after repeatedly calling online travel agent Priceline.com Inc. for a refund. The letter asked the blog to remove or alter the archived post, saying it was “outdated and disturbing” to its client. Consumerist editor Ben Popken blasted the request with a profanely titled entry, calling it an attempt at censorship. “It’s not like we’re spreading libel,” he said. “They were trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.”
Commentary: Okay – the WSJ piece raises some legitimate issues, some of which we have already written about (see the Ethisphere Q1 Edition cover story, “Is Google Labeling Your Company Unethical?”). The bottom line is that in the online world, it is going to be very hard to control what people say about your or your brand unless it is clearly defamatory (an example of defensiveness is illustrated in the Ethisphere Q2 Edition article, “What’s Ailing Johnson & Johnson?,” which discusses J&J’s purchases of negative domain names such as www.thepatchkills.com in order to try to head off negative online postings).
What we could not understand about this WSJ story, however, is how it is certain to backfire on the same very clients that ReputationDefender (we can only assume that their PR agency helped get this piece placed) was trying to defend. Why? Well, we couldn’t help resist looking up the story about the fellow who called Priceline.com 215 times in order to try and get a refund on a plane ticket – and on whom the General Counsel of Priceline.com called NYPD and had the fellow arrested! How did we miss that story? Many pieces, including the one below from the Gothamist blog, have disclosed intimate details of the event:
The company even went so far as to claim in court that they had to switch to an automated customer-service system in response to Segev’s 215 calls.
A judge did later dismiss the charges, but the damage was done and Segev had already spent 40 hours in holding cell (“A tough-looking cellmate asked him, ‘So, what are you in for?’ ‘Priceline refund’ the musician sheepishly replied. It went downhill from there.”). And Segev still hasn’t gotten his money back, though he has filed suit against Priceline for malicious prosecution.
Oh so often we are reminded that life is stranger (and funnier) than fiction. Poor Segev.
