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.