This guy wants to protect your online privacy

By Andy Greenberg

updated 8:39 p.m. ET May 19, 2008

If you think Web users have given up on privacy, take a look at Michael Fertik's e-mail inbox. "I have a restraining order on my brother and he is tracking me down. I keep getting death threats. I believe he is finding my information online. Can I hide my phone number and addresses?"

"I am a corrections officer and I want all my information off the Internet ... especially my address. Can you help me?"

These messages came from customers of MyPrivacy, a subscription service Fertik launched last fall to help people pull their details out of the hands of companies that package personal data and sell it on the Web. For $5 a month he offers his subscribers a list of sites where their identifying details are hung out for all to see, and when possible, gives them the option to have them erased.

The problem: MyPrivacy still doesn't work. Fertik's ambitious program has been stonewalled by many of the data businesses it's sought to deal with and has hardly put a dent in the piles of personal information about his customers that are available on the Web. As of now the project has only shown how hard it is to keep from strangers data as basic as a phone number or an address.

The Web is populated by people-focused search engines like Intelius, Peoplefinders or US Search that peddle personal data: the value of your house, criminal records, salary information and employment history.

An Internet entrepreneur finding out just how difficult it is to protect privacy

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Fertik, a 29-year-old graduate of Harvard Law, has built his career challenging the notion that online privacy is a lost cause. In October 2006 he founded ReputationDefender, a company that charges $10 a month to monitor references to its subscribers found on blogs and other sites. ReputationDefender also offers to remove or hide negative content about customers. The service sends friendly requests to offending sites, refers customers to lawyers and creates innocuous blogs and social networking pages to pad Google search results.

In its first year and a half ReputationDefender has seen modest success: The company has grown to 55 employees and took in $2 million of revenue last year. "For every business action there's an equal and opposite reaction," he says. "The business action going on now is the eviscerating exposure of all your stuff, both public and private. People want to regain control of their online identities."

The idea for MyPrivacy came to Fertik two years ago. He began poking around the online data-aggregation companies that collect personal information from public documents such as tax forms, housing documents and criminal records. He says he also traced some data to more private sources like warranty cards and magazine subscriptions.

Fertik counts 230 sites that offer personal information to Web users. Half of them, he says, take requests to opt-out. He saw an opportunity to create a one-stop opt-out shop. As proof of concept, Fertik points to the national do-not-call list, which includes 73% of U.S. households. "You can't get 73% of Americans to do anything except pay taxes and drink Coke," he says. "This is not a niche."

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