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Spock.com To Provide Profiles On Every Human
I ran across an article on BreitBart that has the makings of being disturbing. The article revolves around a new web technology hosted by spock.com, of Redwood city. Their plan is to catalog and post profiles of every human on Earth.
The plan involves harvesting data from various social networking sites,m aggregating it, then making it available on the web for free. The people search engine will be free, the company supported by advertising revenues.
The Electronic Freedom Foundation has this to say about spock.com:
"More and more of our lives appear online, or are being organized online, said Derek Slater, an activism coordinator at Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy rights group."It can be very annoying to see so much of someone online, potentially without putting that (information) online oneself," Slater said.
Granted, there is a heckuva lot of info out there on millions of people. There's a lot of info on me just on this website, but not enough, I think, to be able to find my home.
One concern I have is that such a website might be used to aid criminal activity. I won't know what the potential is until I can have a chance to look at what it is they are posting up on the internet. If they are truly able to scrape enough details on individuals, then the potential for this tool to be used by burglars can be fairly significant. Nothing like having an online roadmap to determine which houses to hit, and possibly find out when people are away for an extended length of time. (I knew a couple that blogged their four month backpacking trip.)
Another problem I have is that they are gathering data from other sites to use for their own profit. This is, in my opinion, a form of trespassing. I have had issues with people scrapping stuff off of my websites and then posting it as their own in the past. It's a pain to have to deal with. In the case of spock.com, they are harvesting data from social networking sties such as myspace (which is mentioned in the article), and, one can assume, other sites such as youtube, livejournal, AOL, and a host of others, though they are not specifically mentioned.
I don't know about the rest of the world, when I post information for a user profile I expect it to stay local to that community, not be harvested by some third party for their own personal gain. Granted, it is getting easier to find information on people on the web through various online communities, however the availability of such data does not give these jokers the right to harvest it and use it for their person gain. I don't want spock.com coming along and performing a Vulcan Mind Meld with my community profiles.
According to the piece, they claim that they will honor an opt-out plan. The onus shouldn't be on us to get removed from their site. It should be up to us to determine if we want to be listed there.
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