THE BRIEFING Reputation PRESENT DANGER
For HNWs with business interests, public profiles and family members to protect, the internet poses bigger risks than ever before. Here, experts in digital security, reputation management and law tell Chris Stokel-Walker how to mitigate the threat
THE COUPLE WERE happy. They had built an array of successful businesses, they supported a range of charitable causes and they were genuine patrons of the arts. But, preferring privacy to self-promotion, they didn’t like to shout about any of it. Having secured a heart operation for a child from a developing country, they preferred to focus on the next child they could help, rather than give interviews or issue press releases to broadcast their achievement. ‘They never cared to be known online,’ says Valeriya Melnichuk, a director at advisory firm Highgate. But then – as often happens in families – there was a falling-out, and then a rift. While the couple continued their work, some of their relatives bore a grudge – and decided to take action. They filled the digital void about the family with smear stories – a dark arts PR campaign. A few negative articles were published about the couple, which they shrugged off. ‘Who cares,’ they reasoned, Melnichuk recalls. ‘We know we’re good people.’ However, the negative PR campaign, waged on the digital battlefield, took its toll. Banks began probing the couple when they opened new accounts, asking them to explain some of the more troubling claims they found online. They had to jump through hoops to prove the source of their income was legal after banks pointed to Google search results that claimed otherwise. Beyond a mountain of paperwork and bureaucracy to do everyday things that had previously been normal, there was a more pernicious effect on them. Their children started growing up and were teased at school about scurrilous gossip on social media. They then began asking their
parents whether the claims were true – prompting difficult conversations to dispel the lies. The campaign ‘didn’t ruin their life’, says Melnichuk. But it became ‘more and more present in their business and personal interactions’. The couple eventually approached
Highgate for help. When the firm looked into what was being said online, it found a tangled web of half-truths and supposition damaging their reputation. On the internet, anonymous accounts can say anything – and anything you say can be used against you. The solution was simple: use positive, genuine stories to drown out the negative lies. Highgate began a positive PR blitz, communicating more clearly all the good things the couple were doing and highlighting their foundation. It enabled the couple – who had always avoided ‘oversharing’ – to tell their own story and crowd out the mistruths. The negative stories were pushed down and out of search
results for their name, and the awkward conversations – with bankers and their own children – became a thing of the past. Of course, such a situation could have been prevented from taking root, had the couple been quicker to accept the realities of modern life for HNWs: if you don’t have a digital presence or profile, someone else will create one for you. But it can be difficult to strike a balance. Talk too little and an information void exists into which disinformation pours. Share too much and you risk tipping off bad actors, who might see an opportunity for ill-gotten gains.
The starting point is that everything is online, or can end up online. A lot of HNWs don’t appreciate how they leave information behind
IF A PRIVATE DETECTIVE were following you round as you lived your life, tracking and tailing every shop you entered, every place you visited and every conversation you had, you’d act quickly to stamp it out. But when the same thing happens online, people often ignore it. They shouldn’t. By one estimate, the internet contains 250 trillion web pages. ‘That is an enormous amount of data,’ says Cameron Colquhoun, who founded corporate intelligence consultancy Neon Century after the best part of a decade at GCHQ, the British government’s intelligence headquarters. ‘Very often people are not targets simply because of their personal history, but because of what they represent,’ says Thomas Eymond-Laritaz, founder and CEO of Highgate. ‘And this is when it’s becoming dangerous – either because they represent wealth, or they represent success, or they represent a certain political orientation.’ It’s therefore vital to consider what this means for the way you live your life. ‘The starting point is that everything is online, or can end up online,’ says Emma Woollcott,
CLEAR AND
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