The web is a marvel for freedom of speech, but it also gives the mad, bad and criminal free rein to have their say, thanks to the proliferation of blogs, social networks and message boards. If you picked up a newspaper and found an article accusing you of cheating on your spouse, selling drugs or financing a coup you would naturally expect a court to award you substantial damages (assuming none of it was true).

Most newspapers take care to ensure what they publish is accurate and non-defamatory because the law says they must, because they depend on the trust of readers and because there are guidelines requiring balanced reporting and fair play.

The same rules don’t apply online. There is often no invigilator preventing information being published and no ombudsman to complain to. If the website is hosted in Kazakhstan then your chances of extracting damages may be slim. Worse, even though the damaging information is often only a Google away from the eyes of bosses or friends and family, Google is not normally accountable for the material it turns up.

Earlier this year Helen Jones (not her real name), 24, from south Wales, received a flurry of obscene correspondence on her work e-mail, all sent by total strangers. Why? Because someone had posted a photo of a nude woman purporting to be her on a social networking site called Faceparty (www.faceparty.com), along with her real contact details.

Other people have found themselves the victims of malicious online abuse, usually on sites where bloggers can post messages anonymously.

In this respect the internet is like a wall on which anyone can scrawl graffiti, and there seems to be no shortage of frustrated geeks with time on their hands and scores to settle.

Cyber-defamation and cyber-stalking are a growing concern in the digital age, but there are some steps you can take to protect your reputation.

1 Assess the damage

The first step is knowing what’s out there. Try tapping your name into a search engine, making sure you enclose it in double quotation marks (which can reduce irrelevant results by 90% or more). If your name is a common one, be sure to include some other key details about yourself, which will narrow the search.

Next, try scouring blogs for appearances of your moniker with the blog search tool at the search engine www.clusty.com. Finally, scan the web for pictures tagged with your details, using Google’s image search engine (click the “image” option above the Google search bar). There are places on the web where search engines don’t easily go, but these procedures are a good starting point.

2 What can I do?

When Helen Jones’s family complained to Faceparty, the site quickly removed the offensive material — and this should be your first action should something similar happen to you. Most social networking services, including MySpace and Bebo, say they will remove material immediately following a complaint. The same applies when dealing with blogs, message boards or any other websites. The internet service provider (ISP) that hosts the site is obliged by law to remove offending material as soon as you alert it, so contact it first. If it doesn’t, then it is considered liable and you might be able to sue it for damages in a UK court.

The golden rule here is to keep all evidence by taking grabs of web pages, for instance — go to the page in question and hit the “print screen” key on your keyboard, then open up the Paint program in Windows, paste the grab, and save it.