It's laughable sometimes how schizophrenic our cultural mores are. For example, parents have no qualms buying their kid video games about killing cops, but when some illicit sexual content turns up in the same game, they call in the national guard. Marijuana possession is a felony, but alcohol pours as freely as ever and is responsible for nearly 50% of traffic fatalities. People will drive around a parking lot for 20 minutes searching in vain for a spot 10 feet closer the front door of... 24 hr fitness. Credit agencies have painted terrifying pictures of identity theft that costs consumers $50 billion a year in fraud, but then many of us have no reservations about listing the most sordid personal details out on the web for public scrutiny.
So it was with great interest that I took the beta version of people-search-engine, "Spock" for a test drive.
Of course the first search was for vanity. Initial impressions:
Meh. Is that it?
Of course, what was I expecting? Spock is raiding Linked-in for data on us regular schmoes, and pulling Wikipedia for info on those folks that are (even slightly) more famous. And they are drawing from other sources too -- but in the end, all of this data was already available on Google for anyone that was stalking curious. I guess there is some advantage to the one-stop-shopping aggregation aspect.
Something Wicked this way Comes
But then, after getting bored, I started poking around my own profile. I noticed in the "Tag" section that, using an innocuous little ajax box, Spock was prompting me to enter highly personal information about myself such as What is your hair color? and What city were you born in?
Wait a second -- don't some websites use this last one as a password retrieval question? On a lark I entered some info, and sure enough, this data gets plugged immediately into your own personal tag cloud. I was half expecting What is your mother's maiden name? to pop up next.
My suspicion is that Spock will probably not take off, as there is not much "there there", or at least not yet. But the technically-neutral-yet-socially-nefarious data solicitiation is creepy -- not so much because Spock is asking -- but because it's so tempting and easy to give it up if you're not thinking straight.
I remember reading in some kind of hacking-for-non-coders book (wtf?) that around 50% of successful password hacks require no coding knowledge at all - but are instead driven by "social engineering" -- i.e., finding the target's password written on a post-it note within arms reach of their terminal
. I can't think of a more ideal place for fraudsters to prey on the weak and feeble-minded.