When Graeme Wood saw an ultra-wealthy college classmate’s name popping up on weird, perfunctory websites, he suspected something was up.
After some diligent sleuthing, he discovered he was right—the classmate had used an exorbitantly priced reputation-management service to throw Google off his scent and conceal search results that revealed a financial crime he’d committed.
“Part of me sees this brazen shamelessness as just another expression of the privilege of extreme wealth and its certainty that money will heal all wounds,” Wood writes in a New York Magazine article on the subject.
Just as uncomfortable is the parallel subject he doesn’t raise: Will everyone else’s mistakes become permanently and instantly accessible via Google if they can’t pay for such services?
(Via.)
