Blackmail by Search Engine?

Why don't you just hold a gun to my head?

For the last couple of years I’ve monitored my name via Google alerts as part of this experiment of achieving and maintaining search engine rankings for my name. This morning, before I could get through my green tea, I found that my rankings are under attack. Now ranking number nine in Google for “Devin Downey”, is this page from a company called Juglo.com. What’s their pitch? If they were asking for money, you could describe the basis as blackmail. Essentially, register with us or we will continue to post this search engine optimized bio of you until you buy it and write or someone else does.

Here’s the setup, the heading states, “Want to Know Everything About Devin Downey?” and the text on the page provides a fictional bio of “Devin Downey”. At the bottom it asks, “Are you Devin Downey?”, and goes onto the sales pitch:

This profile was autogenerated by Juglo and optimized to rank at the very top within search engines for the phrase “Devin Downey”. If you are Devin Downey you can now sign up and claim this profile as yours.

A premium search engine position for this profile means anybody looking for your name in Google™, Yahoo™ or Live Search™ will find the information YOU want them to see. Join the Juglo community and promote your name online.

The unstated message is essentially, if you don’t register for this profile with us, someone else may very well do so and write things about you that are much more concerning than our “example” bio. After years and years of seeing this done on the corporate level, I guess it was only a matter of time before a company used a blatant strategy like this one to do the same at the private citizen level. To me, it seems not altogether different then when people have created profiles on Myspace and Facebook of famous people and built up huge lists of friends and then attempted to sell the profile to the celebrity’s management team. The major difference is that they are not asking for money (at least for now) but rather they have the opportunity to utilize your registration information. In their privacy statment they state, “I agree that Juglo uses the information that I enter in the Juglo user panel (such as gender and attended college, profession, etc.) and that I voluntarily display on my own profile, to send me personalized targeted advertising and / or special offers and services via the Juglo network.”

Something about all this just seems unsavory. Still, it’s not all that different than Naymz, Zoom Info or Classmates.com, other than in the approach. While those companies rely on information harvested from existing files on the internet or consumer supplied content, this company took an extra step and has created a fictional bio and optimized it. It just seems to go too far, as I believe people should opt into participating in social media as opposed to having their arm twisted into giving a company their private information in return for protecting their reputation to a small degree.

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