Managing your online reputation

New York: In this week's New York Times Magazine, I focus on a problem that's affecting more and more people around the globe: How should we live our lives in a world where the Internet records almost everything and forgets almost nothing, where every photo, Facebook status update, Twitter post and blog by or about us is stored forever in the digital cloud? I open the article, "The End of Forgetting," with Stacy Snyder, a young teacher in training who was denied a teaching degree because she posted a photo of herself on MySpace wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup with the caption "Drunken Pirate."

I first wrote about digital privacy for the magazine 10 years ago, right after the Clinton impeachment scandal. Monica Lewinsky had emerged as an advocate of privacy in cyberspace when prosecutors subpoenaed her home computer, retrieving e-mail messages that she had tried to delete. In a world of short attention spans, I argued, privacy protects us from being misdefined and judged out of context on the basis of snippets of information rather than genuine knowledge.

Back then, I never could have anticipated the explosion of social-networking technologies like Facebook and MySpace, where people are being judged out of context not only by private information that others have revealed against our will but also by public information that we've decided to share with a limited audience.

The challenge of asserting control over our online reputations isn't easy, but two of the most thoughtful cyberthinkers I interviewed have agreed to answer your questions until July 25. Michael Fertik is the founder of ReputationDefender, a firm that offers practical solutions for cleaning up your online reputation, and Paul Ohm is a law professor at the University of Colorado who has some creative proposals for new laws that could limit the ability of employers to fire, or refuse to hire, people based on their legal online behaviour.