Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Spock seriously creeps me out

Spock.com has surmised my existence by aggregating my internet fragments

Now, juxtaposed, are my Linked In, Friendster, Livejournal, Flickr, and a bunch of other digital fragments that I rather like having just far enough apart that it requires work to get from one to another. Now, rather than having Linked In be the presumed-appropriate canonical place to find my professional info and Facebook the presumed-appropriate canonical place to find my personal info (both are services which mostly give me control over what shows up), Spock goes and mashes them all up.

Particularly irritating is that it performs what the company surely believes is a valuable service without me asking and without asking me to opt in. Instead, I discovered it one day when a contact invited me to their "spock trust" network. I felt like I'd been let in on the secret that there was a dossier out there on me that I didn't know about. From the company's strategic point of view, they feel like they have to do this because they're building social software that derives value from the completeness of the social network, so making those nodes and edges wait until the referent user opts in slows down their great plans.

The other weird thing about Spock is that other people can add information about you and vote on info that others have added. So at some level, it's almost as people were to be invited to write wikipedia articles on you. This idea of others adding information about me into the public sphere seems like both thoughtlessness and the presumption of exhibitionism.

So instead, I've taken to misinforming it. I've told it that I'm male. I don't really add information to it. I wonder what it would take to confuse it.

1 comment:

Savannah said...

I hadn't heard about this service, and yes, I can see why it would be creepy. The interesting thing here to me is that it was the change in expectations that messes with you. Everything was set to be one way (two identities), and not they are merged which is not how you envisioned the world. As we change our technological abilities, we change these expectations constantly. Data mining existing data sources is to me the penultimate example of this phenomenon, but this is a great example as well. Thanks for sharing!