PC World Magazine warns us, “What You Don’t Know about Your Online Reputation Can Hurt You” and says that not only employers, but banks may be looking at not just what you do online, but perhaps even what your friends and connections say about you.
They mention a company called Rapleaf. Rapleaf’s website explains, “Rapleaf finds information about you across the web, including online communities and social networks, to help you discover what is publicly available about you on the Internet.”
PC World goes a bit further, saying “Rapleaf scours the Web to compile your status updates, Twitter ‘tweets’, the online organizations you join, the sites you link to, and the comments you post and convert it all into a consumer profile called a social graph…The social graph reveals behavior patterns related to what you like, what you don’t like, what you want, what you don’t want, etc.. Rapleaf presents the service as a marketing tool–enabling companies to target marketing efforts more intelligently, and with more precision than base demographics like age, gender, or location.”
A Speedplexer test didn’t glean any useful info from Rapleaf, but Google’s similar tool–the Google Privacy Dashboard – served up a slightly creepy overview of all the information they have based on our connections through Google — including purchases and how it was paid for, the shipping address, who has been e-mailed most often, recent searches and map addresses viewed.
Of course, a simple search by name on both Yahoo and Google presented a much better idea about online presence. But Rapleaf and Google, and services like them, delve deeper. It might be worth knowing what they say, so you can make sure it’s accurate and defend yourself, if necessary, with internet speed!