MyLife Extortion

Post by **Martin Hash** » Mon Jun 06, 2016 7:36 am

I don't know if gender is the defining factor, but two women are trying to start a “Yelp for people” app called Peeple. For those of you who have been living under a rock, Yelp is a smartphone app that lets anonymous people trash your restaurant, or any business, so that it goes broke. No better way to vent your resentment & sense of superiority than to inject your venom into other people's livelihoods. Personally, I've never used Yelp, and I sure as hell would never post to it, which brings us to the dumb asses who want to make money destroying your personal reputation...

Turns out, long before Peeple, there was MyLife. It's basically the same thing, somebody calls you a child molester, and unless you pay to join, you can't rebut the claim, but even if you could, my god, the “child molester” taint doesn't ever go away, except maybe if you pay even more to have the accusation removed. It's an extortion business of the worst sort, and it gets major seed money from venture capital firms who know a good exploitation when they see it. The only thing people willingly pay for is prestige, and they'll pay even more to not have their status decline.

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Though I don't participate in these reputation abuse schemes, I am fascinated by them. When a “background search” ad pops up saying there's somebody Googling my name (usually me I suspect), I'm always sucked into the 5 minute wait while impressive graphics spin & change color, ostensibly searching through millions of semi-secret records, to get every little bit of dirt about me or someone I know. Unfortunately, the “$39 per month for life” demand starts flashing before even a scintilla of information is revealed, and though I'm tempted to see if Aunt Joan got caught having sex with an underage porpoise, I don't, I'm just too cheap. But there are lots of people whose credit card debt is already unpayable, I'm sure they take the bait, and now they know the titillating tidbits while I'm left in the dark.

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Still, the daily reminders from the MyLife company are almost irresistible:

“Martin Hash, There May Be a Negative Criminal Record Found – View Now,” from MyLife Background Monitor.

“Martin: We've Found 1+ Changes to Your MyLife Activity,” from MyLife Activity Summary.

“Martin Hash, Something May Have Been Written About You; Check Your Background Report,” from MyLife Updates.

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Who can ignore that siren's call for long?! Does somebody knows about that candy bar I stole in Third Grade? Is the girl I winked at in the grocery store calling me a masher? Are my enemies, real & imagined, writing falsehoods about my proclivity to spit when I talk? (And lets not even think about what someone might say about that time in Rio with the donkey! OMG.)