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+The internet is a place where mistakes can live forever -- so publicly that one may feel the occasional need for somebody to clean up after them. A new startup aims to do just that.

Reputation Defender will contact data hosting services and request the removal of any materials -- from embarrassing office party photos to blog posts outlining casual drug use -- which threaten the good social standing of any web citizen willing to pay the company's monthly service fee. Reputation Defender charges between $9.95 and $15.95 per month for their services, depending on the length of the contract.

Michael Fertik and his partners originally conceived of Reputation Defender as a way for parents to protect their children from potentially damaging postings to social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook. Furthermore, such material, posted by a student in a fit of youthful indiscretion, could threaten the author's employability once he reaches the professional world and its army of Google-savvy hiring managers.

"I don't like the idea that kids and teenagers might suffer lifelong harm because of momentary mistakes," says Fertik. According to CareerBuilder.com, twenty-six percent of hiring managers say they have used Internet search engines to research potential employees, and one in ten has looked on a social networking website.

Using both site scraping robots and good old-fashioned human detective skills, Reputation Defender promises to scour the internet -- particularly social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Xenga and Flickr -- for materials that could be damaging your childrens' futures.

However, Fertik quickly realized that Reputation Defender had a broader appeal.

"It seemed natural that adults might want the service, too," he says. "We all make honest mistakes, and there's no reason the Internet should make those mistakes eternally hurtful to ourselves and others."

Fertik draws an analogy between Reputation Defender and consumer credit reports. "It's useful to have your credit monitored and to be on top of your credit score before there's ever a problem," he says. "It's the same way with personal reputation. In the internet era, everyone needs to know what's being said about him or her (or his or her child) before it's too late."

Reputation Defender breaks its services into three categories: "My Reputation," which is aimed at adults hoping to track down and eliminate those momentary lapses of reason; "My Child," for parents who want to protect their children from errors of youth that may come back to haunt them later in life; and "My Privacy," which helps to remove a client's data from the web's various data brokering websites that store private information such as social security and drivers license numbers, home addresses and phone numbers.

The first two services are offered on the company's site now, but My Privacy is not yet publicly available.

Reputation Defender's advisory board includes a former presidential campaign speech writer, a Law Professor at Harvard and an MIT graduate. Fertik, who himself is a graduate of Harvard Law school, concedes that there are some types of content which are close to impossible for his company to remove.

"Some clients and prospective clients would like us to get news articles in major publications or court records removed from the Internet," Fertik says.  "We've had to tell them that these requests are extremely difficult to fulfill and sometimes impossible."

In such cases, Reputation Defender offers its clients a full refund.

Fertik declined to offer an exact description of his company's means of removing content. "I can say we have codified a series of procedures that we are continually refining," he said, "and that are specific to the source, location and nature of the content we are asked to destroy."

If you're a website owner and Reputation Defender knocks on your door, you are technically not legally bound to remove any photos or posts unless they could be considered libelous.

"Most people will take materials down just to avoid the hassle of dealing with possible litigation," says Susan Crawford, an associate professor of law at Cardozo Law School who specializes in cyberlaw and telecommunications law.

"If the letter is sufficiently threatening," says Crawford, "the threaten-ee could bring his or her own lawsuit seeking a declaration that what they posted wasn't unlawful. But, again, most people will just buckle rather than fight back."

Fertik says that his company considers itself sensitive to First Amendment issues, so there is a line that the company will not cross when asking websites to remove material its clients consider damaging.

"We are not too keen on the idea of squelching genuinely newsworthy speech," he says.
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