“You Are Who Google Says You Are,” Says Exec As His Brand.com Reviews Strategies Of How To Escape Search-Results Heck

Now this won’t help those who’re trying to dodge corporate or government surveillance of the internet and communications, and it won’t do squat for NSA leaker extraordinaire Edward Snowden who has shown a phenomenal knack for turning himself into one of the hottest brand names on the internet, but for people with lesser challenges and not quite the opportunities, there is a whole industry that has jumped into this maelstrom where “privacy is dead” but where you can manage what appears online, and so Michael Zammuto, president of Brand.com reviews how to get a grip on it.

“Google yourself because you are who Google says you are,” he wrote on his Linkedin page for just the sort of recalcitrant people like me who grew up in a different era when you still were who you said you were. Or at least you were what you did, or what others said you did, or what clothes you wore, or whatever. But Google didn’t figure into the equation. It does now.

“Get over it,” Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy admonished us back in 1999 during the dotcom bubble when his company’s stock was one of the irrationally exuberant highflyers before it transitioned to a penny stock to be gobbled up by Oracle. But apparently, his words fell on my deaf ears because I still haven’t gotten over it. I cling to my illusions of privacy.

And companies are in the same boat. Just about any entity that does anything is in some form or other on the internet. It’s all part of one of the few growth industries these days: Big Data, a massive accumulation of data that will never be purged or deleted, but will grow exponentially – “Facebook must add several petabytes of storage per day to keep up with its users,” Businessweek observed laconically. It documents even the tiniest shred of information for all times to come, while it gets analyzed, combined, mined, and used endlessly.

It’s the sector of unlimited opportunities: it makes money creating new problems – for example, by putting everything online – then turns around and offers cool solutions to the very problems it just created. For a price. Ka-chink. The perfect revenue loop.

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