03 · A personal position
This field has no license to revoke and no board to complain to. Anyone can call themselves a reputation adviser, and the person hiring one has almost no way to check.
That is not a complaint. It is the condition of the work, and it means the burden falls on the practitioner to say what he will not do and then be held to it.
These are mine. They are personal rather than corporate. The firm publishes its own standard, and this is the reasoning I brought to it.
01
That is not a soft sentiment. It is the whole argument. A search result compresses a life into a single episode, and the compression is usually inaccurate, not because any individual fact is wrong but because everything else has gone missing. Restoring the rest is legitimate work. Deleting the episode is usually not.
02
I do not assert innocence. I do not try to influence proceedings. I do not act against the primary record: a court filing, a regulator’s action, a newspaper’s reporting stays where it is and stays findable. What I work on is whether everything else that is true about a person is findable alongside it.
03
Some material is accurate, current, and proportionate. Some is decaying on its own and would be revived by touching it. Some situations need a lawyer, not me. Saying so costs a fee and is the most useful thing I can offer, and I have never regretted it.
04
I do not write commentary and attach a client’s name to it. If someone has nothing to say on a subject, the honest options are to develop something or to choose a different subject.
05
No invented reviews, no manufactured profiles, no synthetic commentary, no purchased followers. This is the easiest line to hold and the one most often crossed in this industry, because it works briefly and the consequence lands on the client rather than the vendor.
06
Where material documents conduct that is continuing and damaging identifiable people, reducing its visibility is not reputation work. It is something else, and I decline it regardless of how the request is framed.
07
I have made mistakes in this work, including one I still think about. A standard nobody has ever failed is not a standard, and I would rather account for the failures than pretend to a record I do not have.
If any of this reads as against my own commercial interest, that is because some of it is. I have concluded that in an unlicensed field the only durable advantage is being the person who says the unwelcome thing first.