Alongside Techonomy’s recent mini-conference on the Internet of Everything in Menlo Park in May, we interviewed Michael Fertik, CEO of Reputation.com. Fertik is one of the world’s most successful innovators focusing on a topic of great concern globally—privacy on the Internet. Reputation.com can sanitize and improve the way one is viewed in Google searches and other online contexts, and Fertik has given more thought than most to what we are doing as the Net evolves and more and more info about us is exposed in disparate contexts. In this video interview he talks about his hopes and fears, and waxes surprisingly philosophical about the relative importance and value of being human, and being a machine.
Fertik more recently elaborated following revelations about the NSA’s intrusions into phone and Internet activity:
“As I discuss in this Techonomy video, human beings should be at the center of the Internet—that authentication layer is what’s missing from the Internet’s original design and intent. We hope to invert the model of the Internet through our data vault work—we see a great opportunity for both individuals and businesses in returning the control of a person’s data to that individual.”
