You’ve been Spocked!
by Angela Norton
Like the idea of an online directory where you can type in the name of any person in the world and get a profile of them?
What if people could search for your name and find out everything about you, without you knowing it?
This may not be far from reality.
Take a look at Spock.com
Spock aims to build the “broadest and deepest people specific search engine” that will help users find and discover people through online profiles.
The site is currently in beta testing phase, however, its creators already claim to have over one hundred million people indexed, with millions more being added every day.
How does it work?
The search automatically crawls public websites (such as Bebo, MySpace and Hi5), then collects and regurgitates information on the individuals. The results are displayed in your very own Spock profile - whether you wanted it or not.
Of course, some information is protected by privacy laws, but whatever you say about yourself online is fair game and can be used on Spock.
There’s still a long way to go before this becomes the comprehensive person search they are aiming for, as there are many people not yet in the system (although you can add yourself if Spock hasn’t already found you).
Tags and keywords
What’s really interesting about Spock is that it then takes keywords from the information it finds and creates tags to ‘label’ you. However, the tags don’t always work the way they’re intended.
If the automatically constructed Spock profile of Americablog’s owner, John Aravois, was anything to go by, he didn’t strike a particularly brilliant impression on his page given one of his tags was ‘pedophile’ (which Mr Aravois was understandably unhappy about).
After investigation, it seems the Spock bot picked up on Mr Aravois’ extensive writings about the scandal surrounding former Congressman Mark Foley, who resigned from Congress amid allegations he had sent sexually explicit messages to young boys.
Watch out…
Individual users can ‘claim’ their own profile once it shows up. Once claimed, you will have more influence over what tags and information are displayed on your page.
Aravois’ problematic tag has since been removed, but if you have a profile on a social network and want to avoid the same issue John Aravois had, it’s probably a good idea to keep tabs on whether Spock has found you.