The founders of new site called Spock.com have set quite a task for themselves. They want to index information on every person in the world. Spock.com says it has already indexed 100 million people and is adding one million names per day on the invitation-only, test version of its Web site, which will be made available to the public in mid-August. Users will be able to add keywords, pictures and other personal and professional information about people with an internal system on the site to filter out false information that could destroy the Web site's credibility. Each Spock.com user will have an "authority ranking" that can go down if the information provided for a profile is rejected.
You don't have to be an Internet privacy expert, though, to worry about possible abuse. These days, with some people checking things like their credit rating every day, you have to wonder if we all are going to have to monitor what's online about ourselves. Organizations like the privacy rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation agree. "More and more of our lives appear online, or are being organized online," Derek Slater, an activism coordinator at EFF says. "It can be very annoying to see so much of someone online, potentially without putting that (information) online oneself." And, by the way, people search engines have little to worry about legally. As third parties, they are not held accountable under U.S. law for putting on their Web sites information provided by others. Just one more thing to worry about, eh?
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