The Permanence of Reputationally Damaging Data
Reputations are easily damaged, more so than perhaps ever before in history. Anyone, even anonymously, can say anything about you and irrelevant of whether it’s true or not, allegations and falsehoods spread online, like virtual wildfire, taking on a permanence that is hard to combat, correct or erase. The impact false information can have on you has never been greater than it is today. And as we advance by feeding ‘dirty data’ to AI, things can only get worse.
We live in an electronic age where data is the ‘new gold’: it’s fast flowing, it’s collected, structured, sold, analysed and relied upon by everyone from government to the financial industry.
I know because I created World-Check.
But what happens when it is wrong? What happens when it is baseless? Or politically motivated? News outlets place greater importance on breaking a story than on fact-checking. Determining what is fake and what is not, is becoming increasingly difficult. The impact though, for individuals, professionally, financially and reputationally, is long-lasting not just because, like Vegas, ‘what gets said online, stays online, forever’ but because erroneous information makes it into KYC databases.
One minute you’re a respected, law-abiding citizen and the next your account has been blocked, a payment has been frozen, and your reputation is in question. And all of this because of unsubstantiated information. It has never been as important as it is now to not only uphold your data rights but to hold KYC database providers too account.
David Leppan
Founder, World-Check & Co-founder, WealthX
Founder & CEO, Managing Reputational Risk Ltd
