Time.com Slams Spock; Launches Next Wednesday
Michael Arrington
20 comments »
Anita Hamilton at Time.com does drive-by on people search engine Spock. And while there is plenty to criticize (business model?), Hamilton clearly has no clue about how Spock actually works.
The article, titled “Online Snooping Gets Creepy,” suggests that Spock and a few other sites are out to disclose private information:
And so, after just a few minutes of clicking around, I had found Sacasa’s MySpace page, her age, home address and what appears to be quite a lot of information about her family in Florida — all without using Google or any other popular search site.
She incorrectly lumps Spock, which gathers information about people from places like LinkedIn, Wikipedia and social networks, with the more dubious companies that do serious and sometimes unethical data mining of private information like email and home addresses, phone numbers, and social security numbers. Spock doesn’t do any of that, but are the featured target of the article anyway.
Look for a Spock launch next Wednesday, August 8. If you can’t wait that long, hop over to InviteShare and get a private beta pass. The company is giving out a lot of invites, and there is no waiting list right now. There are already over 100,000 people in the beta.
Old media commenting on web 2.0 is a terrible combo. These were the same people that named “us” as the person of the year, lame.
Yeah I mean if they want creepy, try Zabasearch, or Jigsaw like in the link. Come on.
This is like blaming guns for killing people.
Are you sure she’s “slamming” spock…?
“…all without using Google or any other popular search site.” has a little ring to it.
If Spock spiders public sources of information like Wikipedia and LinkedIn, where users voluntarily hand over their information, then obviously making that information accessible at yet another locale is FINE. It’s not like Spock is paying off hospitals to surrender medical information for the sake of making it public.
The idiots at the drive-by media (nice use of the term, Mike) shouldn’t be commenting on a service that they dubiously suspect might be capable of harming users by making certain pieces of information public when the entire purpose of the drive-by media is MAKING PIECES OF INFORMATION ABOUT INDIVIDUALS OR ORGANIZATION PUBLIC.
Hilarious. I agree with Tien,
“Old media commenting on web 2.0 is a terrible combo. “
“Our robot skimmed it off some webpage it surfed” isn’t much of a defense for libel.
I have alpha stage search engine….
My search engine and company fires employees for security brench, grammar police, crooks, greedy people. Of course, I can make lots of money.
Money sucks anyways. It’s full of paper, odor, germs, and waste of time.
Thanks for the support, Mike. I’m totally biased of course, but I guess the author is probably right. I’m sure we in Silicon Valley would all agree that culling through 22 pages of Google or other popular search engine results to find out the essence of a person is MUCH less creepy than having Spock find the essence for you. And what is up with those cookie things? CREEPY! : )
If you ever need some spock invites, come to me. I have a few. Btw, Spock does not unethically snoop using some illegal means.. It tries to meaningfully aggregate what otherwise would have been spread all over the Social Web.
It sound to me like Spock are not he the snoopers. In any businesses the completion will have some thing not not nice to say. BE NICE!
One thing the journalist doesn’t mention is all the information is already publicly out there. Either the person put it there on their public profile or someone reported on you publicly. Everything else is opinions and people can create opinions of you without Spock or any of the people search engines.
All you info belong to us!
I think this limits what Spock can be. If it ever became dominant, then there would be a massive privacy outcry and its functionality would have to be curbed. While there are other ‘people search’ sites that offer equal or more information, none of them are mainstream or claim to be Web 2.0.
Also, how did they get around the trademark infringement issue? Is Paramount an investor? Seems risky to name your site after someone else’s commercial trademark.
“What makes these sites controversial is that they gather all this information without your permission.”
Without your permission? The information that is gathered is done so from publicly available web sites. If you don’t want Spock (or anyone else for that matter) to list that information, don’t put it on the web. This is a joke!
i also reviewed spock.com for my upcoming column in “Competitive Intelligence Magazine” (from SCIP.org) - along with dozens of other similar resources - and i DO understand how it works, and i DO think that it sucks…sorry, but those of you who know what i do for a living may enjoy my research expert opinion…the column will be public later this fall so hopefully will make the rounds…
Perhaps many of you don’t realize it but there is a lot of information about you that is in the public domain. For instance all records about births, property transactions, arrests, marriage, bankruptcy, etc is available for public consumption. That information is slowly being made available online.
So someone could build a search engine which builds a profile about you without your permission and posts that publically. To me that is creepy. Just because info about me is in the public domain, it doesn’t mean I approve of that. Unless laws change there is really nothing that can be done to prevent this. The only thing slowing this down is the info is at the City/Town Clerks office and government is slow to modernize their data infrastructure.
Dear TechCrunch,
Before you falsely accuse me of doing “drive by”, you might want to get your own facts straight. I got a personal demo of Spock last week from co-founder Jay Bhatti and have been using it ever since. I’m quite familiar with how Spock works and devoted an entire paragraph of the story to describing it.
Your erroneous post is a cheap shot — particularly for a site that I have always enjoyed.
Anita Hamilton
Staff Writer
TIME Magazine
500 Internal error when you try to sign up. Meh.
Ouch. You just got slammed.