Spock is Evil
I’m not talking about that guy on the right. I’m talking about the new social networking site, spock.com. 
The different thing about Spock.com is that instead of asking people to sign up, they’re crawling other sites and pulling profiles, and populating their database with what’s already out there.
So you go to Spock.com and enter your name, and they show you what they know about you. They probably already know something about you if you use other social networking sites.
But here’s where it gets evil: If you want to “claim ownership” of the page that has the information about you, then you need to prove that you’re the person whose page they originally crawled.
Google does this sort of thing by asking you to put a special code somewhere on a page and then they go crawl it, but Spock goes for the gusto:
So all I have to do is give them my LinkedIn login and password, and they’ll let me claim ownership of my information, which they stole from LinkedIn.
Once they can log into my LinkedIn account who knows what other information they’ll harvest from me or my contacts. No thanks.
August 9th, 2007 at 11:58 am
Hi – Just read your post and wanted to make a few comments on your observations.
1. We are a search engine and we only crawl public data on the web and we adhere to all the robots.txt rules of each site we crawl. The main way that we are different then Google is that we organize information around the person, as opposed to the web document. Second, unlike Google, we make a full effort never to display personally identifiable information like you SSN, phone number, home address, etc, etc. Google on the other hand will display this information for the world to see if they crawl it. We don’t think it’s cool to show that information on Spock. What we want to show are things that people would want to be searched by. For example, if you are an SEO expert, you probably want to come up in a search on Spock when someone searches for “SEO”. That’s a positive experience for both the user and the person who is searched.
Also, a lot of users who have been using Spock like the idea that they can go to Spock and actually see in one place where they are on the web, and how they can go about to remove that information from the internet. They like the alerts we send them even more, where we can notify people if someone about them has appeared on the web (a blog post about them, etc).
2. With regards to claiming your profile. We placed that initial requirement (give us credentials) so that other people could not take over someone else’s search result. We don’t store your credentials and never harvest any information based on your credentials for claiming.
However, I REALLY REALLY like your idea above of giving people an option to put something (a code, key, etc) on the pages they want to claim, and we could verify it accordingly with our crawl. I’ll talk about that idea with my engineers to see how we could implement that feature.
August 9th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
Hello,
This is Maia, from Spock. I just wanted to let you know that it is completely optional to enter in your credentials to external sites. Feel free not to if you don’t feel comfortable, although we never store your information, or use it for any purpose other than verifying your identity. It is not necessary to enter your information in order to claim your search result on Spock, it is there for your convenience as the fastest way. Entering in your credentials immediately verifies your identity safely. If you would like to claim your profile without entering your credentials, just e-mail info[at]corp.spock.com with the URL of the profile you would like to claim.
Best,
Maia