The opposite/offensive approach, if you’re willing to put yourself “out there”, is to make a positive name for yourself on the web. Buy your name domain, keep upstanding public profiles, blog posts, comments, etc. Essentially market yourself to the world and make sure you’re uniquely identifiable and easy to find.

http://therealnews.freehostia.com/wordpress/2008/02/08/defamation-class-action-against-google/

Imagine you’re applying for a job and want to be sure to give the right impression. A diligent protector of your reputation (you always thought you’d run for office one day), you think you know everything there is out there about you. Nothing sticks out in your mind as something someone saw you do. But there is someone with a description identical to yours who’s got a terrible reputation. And when HR does its background check on you, it hears about “you” from some former colleagues of yours who are mistaken. You’re never given a reason for being turned down for the job–just a brief form letter.

I get it–online search might make this scenario more likely for more people. A difference of degree. There are also surely countervailing benefits. So what’s your point besides some abstract call for “more responsibility” (i.e., government regulation)?

A conscientious job hunter can direct a potential employer’s attention to his or her own page by putting a link on their resume. On their page they can directly address any “evil twin” issues, i.e. people with the same name but far worse reputations. It seems like this, coupled with libel suits to discourage outright lies about them, should be sufficient to protect most job hunters from this problem.

But I do see the wisdom of framing this as a problem for employment law, rather than cyberlaw…after all, a P.I. could put together a damaging dossier as effectively as a search engine tailored to find the most embarrassing stuff about X.

To L.E.: Those are great self-help approaches. I have to wonder, though, if personalization may start working on the I.P. address level at some point. That would certainly be some valuable research to have. For example, I think I’ve done the “logout” you’ve mentioned, and still gotten ads for “New Jersey residents”. . . which are at least targeted to the location of the user, if not past search history.

1. log out of any personalization when performing critical searches;

2. check several search engines when performing critical searches;

3. a secondary browser set up to run clean every time (no cookies, history, caches, etc. saved).

These serve two purposes: they let you see what the world sees, and they (#1 and #3, at least) let you conduct some of your business a little more of-the-grid.

What about the following idea? Search engines should offer a “nonpersonalized” mode that anyone can always drop back to using. While HR could use personalized search to be more effective, they would be obliged to let anyone run searches personalized in the same way, for oversight purposes. (With individuals, this kind of idea raises privacy concerns, but I wouldn’t think that HR departments have the same kind of privacy interest in which searches they run.)