The new online people finder search engine Spock has taken the trust issue that most social networks struggle with to new extremes. The service resembles normal social networks, but it differs on one point; the personal data on the system is not necessarily sourced by the person described. That means that other people can source pictures, news articles, web addresses, and other highly sensitive data about you. The only way you can ‘defend’ yourself is by flagging pictures, tags, blog postings as inappropriate and hope the administrators will respond. That’s quite iffy.
Nevertheless, Spock is growing fast. And in a way, that’s understandable. The company definitely fills a niche; type in the name of a person you are looking for, and you have instant access to their web presence in the broadest sense possible to date. I hadn’t registered myself on Spock, but found that my Facebook profile was displayed, my websites were there, as well as about umpteen Google-retrieved articles.
For journalists the service is brilliant so long as you know the name of the person you’re looking for. But if you are hunting for people with a specific qualities, you have to be patient and wait until the company’s built up steam. I typed in ‘government health official‘ and harvested around eight results; two deceased people, the Prime Minister of Norway and the rest of them Asians. The query ‘health official‘ was better; around 60 results. The phrase privacy advocate yielded around seven results.
The company itself hasn’t featured prominently in the news; it’s been written up in InformationWeek, but that’s about it. Spock’s marketing campaign has relied on viral techniques, it seems. I ran into it because it was advertised on CreamAid.com, a site which produces widgets made up of multiple blog post reviews of services and products. This blog post itself might be included in the above widget if Spock has the good sense to take honest reviews seriously. The payment is 15 bucks. I hope that the company changes its registration options soon. Some people already feel they need to step in to fill in their personal profiles before others do it for them. That no doubt will make a case for a privacy advocacy campaign.
2 Comments to “Your Personal Profile Is Listed On Spock Without Your Consent”
March 3, 2008
Angelique,
Thanks for your comment and review of Spock.com. I figured I might add a comment or two with regards to your questions and concerns about publishing information on Spock. First it helps to think of Spock as a people search engine rather than a social networking site such as Facebook or Myspace. What Spock does is similar to Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc, in that we crawl the web for publicly available information and organize it. In your case you have a publicly available listing on Facebook meaning that by searching by name or other information without logging in, there is certain information posted. This information is voluntarily posted by a person and is up to a user to restrict access if they don’t want it to be posted ( I don’t mean to sound defensive but it really is up to a user to monitor themselves). On the privacy end, the benefit of Spock is that you have the ability to claim your own search result, something that you can’t do on other sites, and that you have the ability to enhance and edit your own and others search results. By being able to flag information it helps ensure that a user can correct errors or abuse that may occur.
As far as your searching criteria for a health official. We are a young site and are constantly working on finding new ways to build better and more enriched search results. But again, just as searching by certain terms on Google returns good and bad results, searching on Spock all depends on the terms you search by. As far as press results, not to brag, but Spock has received numerous accolades including Wired Magazines top 10 websites to look for in 2008 and PC Magazines Top 25 sites to look for- this is a link to our Press Page (http://www.spock.com/do/pages/press) if you’d like to check out more.
Please feel free to contact me if you have any additional questions or comments (patrick@corp.spock.com).
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