Is “digital undertaker” the right name? Why the rest of the world calls it online reputation management

01Short answer: it is a Korean label, not an English job title

“What is a digital undertaker?” The question usually reaches us from two directions. Some people read about Korea’s removal industry in the news and want to know what the job is. Others found a provider using the term and are unsure whether it handles their problem. The short answer is that “digital undertaker” is a Korean job title translated word for word. It is not an established English job title, and native speakers do not hear in it what Koreans mean by it.

In Korea the title now covers removing leaked intimate videos, deleting defamatory posts and comments, cleaning up search results and news articles, and identifying anonymous posters. In the US and the UK that work is called online reputation management, usually shortened to ORM, or more narrowly content removal. In Japan it is called net reputation damage control (ネット風評被害対策), in France gestion de l’e-réputation, in Germany Online-Reputationsmanagement.

Names built on “undertaker”, by contrast, still point to death abroad: closing a late relative’s accounts, saving their photos, cancelling subscriptions, handing over digital assets. Introduce removal work as “digital undertaking” and the natural reply is “I’m sorry, who passed away?”

02The name began as a job for the dead

The original Korean definition explains the mismatch. In 2015 the Korea Employment Information Service (KEIS), a government research agency, presented the digital undertaker on its job portal as one of 100 occupations found abroad: someone who deletes and manages a person’s online information after death. In March 2016, when KEIS listed 37 new jobs it expected to appear in Korea within five years, it again defined the digital undertaker as someone who deletes the internet accounts a deceased person had opened while alive.

The metaphor was deliberate. An undertaker takes care of a person’s last arrangements; a digital undertaker would take care of what they left online, so abandoned accounts could not be used for impersonation, fraud or identity theft. Nothing in that definition covered removing a video of a living person or deleting abusive comments.

That work still exists and still matters. It is simply not what most people who search for a digital undertaker in Korea today are looking for.

03How Korea stretched it to the living

The demand in Korea was elsewhere. During the 2010s the country saw a sharp rise in intimate videos shared after break-ups, coordinated abuse of entertainers and influencers, and smear posts against companies. Firms that removed this material appeared, and the press and the firms reached for a name the public already knew. The idea of burying someone’s digital traces moved from the dead to the living.

The 2020 Telegram sexual exploitation scandal fixed the label in place. As removal enquiries surged, an English-language Korean newspaper wrote about busy “digital undertakers”, with the term in quotation marks, a sign that even the reporter knew it was not natural English. A British technology magazine covered Korea’s industry as part of a strange rise of “cyber funerals”.

Today the Korean term almost always means work for living people: leaked video removal, sextortion response, deleting abusive posts, cleaning search results, tracing posters. The name speaks of funerals; the work protects the reputation of people who are very much alive.

04What “digital undertaker” means to an English speaker

An undertaker is a funeral director. Adding “digital” does not move the meaning away from death. An English speaker hearing “digital undertaker” will think of digital legacy or digital estate services: memorialising or closing a profile, retrieving photos for the family, settling online accounts after a death.

The same pattern holds outside English. In Germany actual funeral directors handle the digital estate. The German undertakers’ association, the BDB, said in 2024 that its members can inventory a deceased person’s digital assets, store access credentials safely and in some cases act as digital estate administrator, with an initial assessment from about 100 euros. Japan has its own separate term for clearing a late relative’s phone and accounts, digital belongings sorting (デジタル遺品整理).

So “digital undertaker” is not a wrong word so much as a word in the wrong place. It fits estate work. It does not fit removing a leaked video or managing the reputation of a living client, and in a request to an overseas site operator, host or domain registrar it invites the reader to misfile the request or to doubt who is sending it. That is why SARAZIM LLC never uses it in English and describes its work as online reputation management and content removal.

05What the work is called around the world

Every country has its own law and market, so the names differ, but one pattern repeats: work for living people and companies is named after reputation; work for the dead is named after legacy, belongings or estate.

In the US and the UK, online reputation management covers asking for harmful content to be removed, managing what ranks for a name, and monitoring where a person or brand is mentioned. Where removal is the whole job, as with leaked intimate images, people speak of content removal or NCII removal, for non-consensual intimate imagery.

Japan is a special case. In 2017 the Tokyo District Court held that a paid deletion-request contract with a company that was not a law firm breached the Attorneys Act and ordered the full fee refunded. Japanese firms therefore describe their work as reputation damage control or monitoring, and legal removal claims are filed by lawyers. In France the public careers agency Onisep lists the web cleaner (nettoyeur du web) as an occupation, and the data protection authority CNIL notes that paid reputation-cleaning companies exist. German providers call themselves reputation managers or Löschdienste, deletion services.

06Why the wrong name causes real problems

It is fair to ask whether a name matters this much. In practice it does, in three ways.

Clients misjudge the scope of the job

Some people still ask whether a digital undertaker only deals with the dead. More often the word leaves a picture of one act, deletion, and nothing else. Yet after the original post goes, the title and snippet can remain in search results, the video returns at a new address, and copies sit on dozens of other sites. That is a management problem, not a single deletion.

Requests abroad lose credibility

Much leaked material is hosted outside the victim’s country. A request to a site operator, hosting company or registrar is read faster when it comes from a recognisable kind of business. An unfamiliar job title, especially one that suggests funerals, raises the chance that the request is treated as spam or a prank.

The field drifts into selling certificates

Because the Korean title is not a regulated profession, private “digital undertaker” certificates appeared and are advertised as proof of skill. They mean nothing abroad and prove little at home; see why removal “certifications” prove nothing.

07Reputation management is wider than deletion

Online reputation management is the more accurate name because of how the damage is built. Harmful information about a person does not sit in one place. There is the original post, the copies, the title and preview in search results, autocomplete suggestions, and re-uploads. The work therefore has five layers.

“Digital undertaker” brings only the second layer to mind. What a client actually feels depends on all five: if the original is gone but searching their name still shows the headline, nothing has changed for them. Search results and news articles have their own routes, covered in removing content about you from Google Search and removing a news article about you.

The law is moving in the same direction. Since 19 May 2026 the US Federal Trade Commission has enforced the TAKE IT DOWN Act, which requires covered platforms to remove non-consensual intimate images, and known identical copies, within 48 hours of a valid request. That is one powerful layer. It does not find the copies on sites outside the law’s reach, clean up search results or watch for re-uploads; see the five ways leaked content returns.

08Someone has died, or the problem is about you?

Because “digital undertaker” is used for two different jobs, it helps to start by asking which one you need.

If a relative has died and you need their accounts closed or preserved, you need digital legacy help. Most large platforms have their own routes for this, such as memorialisation or a legacy contact on Facebook, Google’s Inactive Account Manager, or Apple’s Legacy Contact, and the executor of the estate usually needs a death certificate and proof of authority.

If the problem is content about you, or about your company, that harms you now, you need online reputation management or content removal: finding every copy, filing on the grounds each platform accepts, cleaning search results and watching for re-uploads. That is the work Korean firms mean when they say digital undertaker, and the work SARAZIM LLC does.

09Five questions to ask any provider, whatever it calls itself

Anyone can use either name; neither is a licensed profession in most countries. What separates providers is method, so ask these five questions before signing anything.

A provider that cannot answer these concretely is unlikely to deliver, whatever its title. The difference method makes is explained in why security engineering changes the result, and how to compare providers in how to choose a content removal service.

10What SARAZIM LLC does, named correctly

SARAZIM LLC is an online reputation management and content removal firm based in Seoul. In plain terms it does three things. Leaked content removal: finding non-consensual videos and images from two or three photos by face matching, removing them from sites and search results in Korea and abroad, and monitoring for re-uploads. Anonymous poster identification: technically tracing who is behind an anonymous account or the first upload. Reputation management: dealing with harmful posts, articles, reviews and search results about individuals and companies.

The firm is led by a security specialist formerly with Palo Alto Networks and works with software it built itself. It removes more than 52,142 items a month on average, handles more than 914 platforms, and reports a removal rate of 98.2%; processing times vary by platform.

In Korea SARAZIM LLC presents itself as the country’s largest digital undertaker, because that is the word Korean clients type into a search box. Outside Korea it uses the name the rest of the world understands. Either way, the work is the same, and a consultation can start anonymously with photos rather than the video.