It is sometimes unclear which ISP is responsible for a particular site, but the helpful service WhoisView (www.whoisview.com) claims to be able to tell you the hosting details of sites worldwide — simply download the software, enter the IP address of the site you wish to find out more about and WhoisView will give you a name, address and phone number. The IP (internet protocol) address is a unique code that devices use to identify each other on a computer network and can be found with the help of tinyurl.com/yltpl7.

In theory you can sue websites based abroad in British courts as well. However, here’s the rub: if the publisher of the material has no assets in the UK for you to claim in damages — it’s a message board hosted in China, say — then suing it may simply be a costly waste of time. In these cases there really is no legal recourse for you, and the publisher can go on disseminating lies about you online.

3 Who else can help?

Trawling through the vastness of cyberspace is a time-consuming business, but there are companies that will do it for you, more thoroughly than you could yourself. The American firm ReputationDefender (www.reputationdefender.com) will search the web and provide a monthly report detailing everything it finds for $16 (£8.37) a month. It uses page-scouring robots and manual checks of social networks and online image libraries, such as Flickr, but concedes its techniques might not find everything. It also claims to be able to remove content for $30 (£15.70) an item, by way of issuing legal threats, even in the UK. However, not all material can be removed this way.

4 Protecting your privacy

Privacy has certainly taken a battering in the digital era, as Jack McConnell, Scotland’s first minister, knows only too well. Viewers of YouTube (www.youtube.com), the video-sharing site, were recently entertained by mobile phone video clips of his son’s friends cavorting drunkenly around Bute House — Scotland’s equivalent of 10 Downing Street. The intrusive material was quickly removed, but not before causing great political embarrassment to the first minister.

The only way to really protect your privacy is to prevent digital media such as photos and video actually appearing on the web. Be careful what photos you place online and ask friends not to post photos of you without your consent. Bear in mind that everything you write is in the public domain — potentially for ever.

5 Tricky Wiki

Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), the collaborative encyclopedia that anyone can edit, is a potential hotbed of misinformation. Not only can somebody alter what you have written about yourself on the site, but others can post bogus entries. For example, last year a defamatory entry about John Seigenthaler, a senior US journalist and writer, implicated him in the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

The libel, posted as a prank, was not verified by the site’s editors, and sat there for four months. Though the hoaxer was eventually identified and the post removed, the damage had been done. So what can you do? Since the Seigenthaler case, the site has tightened up its security. New pages can be created only by registered account holders, and those users that are found to make intentionally bogus additions are blocked or banned. To have false information removed you simply have to make your case to a site administrator. However, this all still means you have to be constantly looking out for misleading or malicious content.

If you’ve had your reputation attacked unfairly online or experienced a breach of privacy due to material posted on a website, please e-mail us at yourviews@sunday-times.co.uk