One woman wanted provocative pictures of her removed from a website. Another man needed help combatting a person impersonating him on Facebook.
Both turned for help to Brian Bowman, a Winnipeg lawyer who specializes in online reputation management, a growing concern for people trying to control their Internet identity in an age of blogging, flaming and unwanted viral celebrity.
"Having negative information about you on the Internet is having repercussions on people's lives in ways that are quite profound," Mr. Bowman said. "And their first question is usually, 'What can we do?' "
Controlling your online image is the next big thing in the evolution of the Internet, according to many Web commentators, as a growing number of people find themselves publicly disparaged, endlessly hounded or unable to control the spread of personal photographs from inbox to cursed inbox.
Mr. Bowman delivers seminars on reputation management, but said that the unwieldy nature of the Internet makes it difficult for lawyers like him to help in many situations.
"In a lot of cases, the technology and the societal norms are outpacing the legislative reforms," he said.
"You have to consider a number of responses when you're considering online reputation management, and legal is only one of them."
This is where private companies are stepping in, offering to flood the Web with positive information about their clients, pushing negative sites into the background, and seeking out and destroying any unflattering material.
Salina Rahim, a 35-year-old from Los Angeles, hired one such company after receiving a startling phone call from a friend who works with the city's police department.
"He said, 'Salina, you need to go on MySpace and check out this website,' " she recalled.
She had never logged on to the social-networking site, and was shocked to see a profile of herself online, featuring photographs of her taken on a tropical vacation, a streaming porn video (not of her), and messages from more than 75 men responding to postings by the fake Ms. Rahim about how much she enjoyed sex.
"I was completely devastated," she said. "I was angry, I was upset. I was in shock."
The site had been created by an ex-boyfriend, who later admitted to the cyberattack and forwarded her an e-mail to show he had cancelled the MySpace account. But the profile continued to appear online, and an e-mail to administrators was met with an automated reply instructing her to "flag" the offending site.
So she hired a company called Reputation Defender, who pressured MySpace on her behalf until the profile was removed.
"I wouldn't have known how to do it," she said.
Reputation Defender, based in California's Silicon Valley, was started by Harvard law grad Michael Fertik in 2006. His company will do a comprehensive search of the Internet and remove any unwanted or unflattering material for $29.95 (U.S.) an item.
His clients range in age from young adults to retired boomers, but Mr. Fertik is especially adamant about the need to protect the reputations of young people online, both from the harm they could do to themselves and the abuse they suffer at the hands of others.
"The nastiness that all young people are capable of, the momentary mistakes in judgment, used to be quite temporary, but now it's permanent and it's public," he said. "So you have an Internet that becomes an albatross around a lot of young people's necks."
Reputation Defender's approach to getting rid of these items is surprisingly analog: They ask.
"We say, 'Hello, we're from Reputation Defender, our client is so and so, would you please consider taking this down?' " Mr. Fertik said. "It's very polite and if you get to the right person and you write the letter in the right way, usually that's enough."
