Tragic Story Shows Limits of Startups Like ReputationDefender
Earlier this month, I wrote a short post about the startup ReputationDefender, whose mission it is to obliterate damaging online information about its clients, who pay it on a month-to-month or yearly basis. (I reported that the company, which had raised a $2.6 million Series A last fall, has expanded that offering and is raising $5.3 million instead.) The unfortunately reality, however, is that the Redwood City, Calif.-based startup and its sundry competitive peers are powerless to do much more than contact offending Internet sites and ask that they play ball. The point gets underscored in a current Newsweek piece about the Catsouras family of Orange County. The Catsourases lost one of their four beautiful daughters to a gruesome car accident in 2006. The daughter, who’d become mentally unstable and taken cocaine the night before the accident, was nearly decapitated when she steered her father’s Porsche, stolen from the garage, into a concrete toll booth.
