Clean up Net past, at a price

The anonymity of the Internet often lures one into dropping one’s guard, the consequences of which can be sordid. Pictures with a former lover suddenly start sprouting weeks before one’s engagement, and a prospective employer conducts a background check only to come across unsavoury language posted on a blog when one was in college.

Recently, the perils were illustrated in the Anoushka Shankar blackmailing episode.
However, help is at hand. One’s online — and offline — past can be cleaned up, but at a price. “It costs between Rs2.5 lakh and Rs8 lakh a month to manage the online presence of a celebrity or a corporate honcho,” said Mahesh Murthy, founder and CEO, Pinstorm, an online advertising and ‘search engine optimisation’ company.

Experts at Murthy’s firm delete unwanted instances of one’s online activities. The method can be considered the reverse of hacking, where a person of ill intent can trail one online and dig out information that can hurt.

Murthy said an increasing number of corporate big shots and other individuals affected by crimes like cyber stalking are relying on the services of consultants like him. “Top business figures, politicians and people in public life use our services to manage their branding online... Recently, a woman belonging to a conservative family approached our firm to delete from the Web pictures of her kissing a female celebrity on the lip.”

Managing one’s online presence is done through ‘search engine optimisation’. “It means,” said Arpit Bhargava, a Pune-based cyber image consultant, “doctoring a search engine like Google in such a way that positive results show up in preference to links that may cause embarrassment to the client.”