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A good rumor will always have a life of its own. But on the Web, even the dimmest one can grow quicker, uglier and more embarrassing than a zit on a teenager's forehead.
Indeed, by the time a company catches wind of some dirty laundry airing on Fucked Company's message boards or Vault's online water cooler, it's often too late to deploy the PR troops.
But thanks to the increasing sophistication of data-extraction technology offered by a host of Web intelligence agencies, corporate PR is sharpening its surgical-strike capability: the power to extinguish a rumor as soon as it's born.
Although the business of corporate "cybersleuthing" smacks of big brother, there's nothing illegal about companies monitoring public exchange on the Internet. Companies -- and individuals, for that matter -- have been free to do that all along. What concerns privacy advocates, however, is whether corporations will use the new monitoring technology to suppress legitimate online dissent.
"Conceptually speaking, cybersleuthing is nothing new," said Stanton MacCandlish, technical directorate of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy watchdog organization. "It's an outgrowth of something companies have been doing forever. What's troubling is what companies are going to do with this information now that they have it at their fingertips."
Among the companies capitalizing on corporate paranoia is a fleet of Web clipping services that are parlaying their information gathering capabilities into cybersleuthing tools, which function as automated rumor-trackers. CyberScan, CyberAlert and eWatch are among the companies that comb the Web to report what's being said about their clients in all the public and not-so-public corners of the Internet -- from online news outlets to Usenet groups, Web logs and e-mail listservs.
At the forefront of the cybersleuthing industry, some companies, such as online-news trawler Moreover and the "Internet intelligence agency" NetCurrents, offer their clients real-time Web monitoring.
"Moreover sees cybersleuthing in the same continuum as headline news delivery," a company spokesman said. "Though we don't offer to track down the authors of postings, take action, mobilize evangelists or read moods of boards, because of the power of the dynamic database, Moreover could be a great partner to a cyber bounty-hunter."
Unlike more traditional search engines -- which spider through the Web at regular intervals and index all the content they come across -- Moreover captures dynamic information from a smaller pool of sources to provide its clients with relevant and up-to-the-minute results. Whereas search engines such as Google say they sweep the Web every two weeks, Moreover uses an XML-harvesting technology to index some 2200 selected online sources every 15 minutes.
With Moreover's technology, a rumor posted online will show up on the company's radar within 15 minutes of being posted. Short of installing a human "mole" on high-profile sites twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, that's as close as a company can get to having eyes and ears everywhere on the Web.
Although Moreover does not currently track chat-room discussions, it does index closed discussion boards -- those requiring a password and cookie permission for entry -- on a case-by-case basis. Clients need to have the correct password to access the full message. "If it has a URL, it can be extracted by our techniques," Moreover CEO Nick Denton said.
As companies pay more attention to what's circulating on the online grapevine, privacy experts say Web surfers need to be more aware of the fact that public forums on the Internet may be more susceptible to scrutiny and prosecution than offline discussions.
"Too many people consider online conversations like typed phone calls," said Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility. "Different states have laws that regulate the monitoring and recording of phone calls, but those laws don't apply in cyberspace. People have to realize that when they're participating in a chat room or in an online discussion group, they're speaking to a public universe with a very long memory. Anybody could be recording what they say."
Privacy advocates point to a number of instances in which companies have attempted to force ISPs to reveal the identities of anonymous posters. But so far, there's no precedent to determine when and under which circumstances ISPs must disclose user information.
"The problem is these types of cases are dealt with on an ad hoc basis by both the courts and by ISPs," Weinstein said. "For something as sensitive as protecting people's privacy and free speech, there needs to be a due process."
