ATYCLB
August 6th, 2007, 11:15 PM
Online Snooping Gets Creepy
8-2-07
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1649121,00.html
As recently as six months ago, online snooping was mostly done surreptitiously or under the polite guise of "social networking." Now all subtlety has been cast aside. An estimated 30% of all Web searches are aimed at finding people, according to industry statistics, and upstarts like PeekYou, Pipl, Spock, and Wink are vying for a piece of this potentially huge market. These free sites work by scouring the Web for any virtual footprints you might have on MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Yahoo!, Flickr and elsewhere, and then creating a fresh profile that organizes all that information on one page. Even Whitepages.com recently expanded its phone listings to include business addresses and other contact information culled from all sorts of mail-order marketing lists and business directories.
What makes these sites controversial is that they gather all this information without your permission. The resulting profiles can be embarrassing or simply wrong. And getting those profiles removed or changed can be impossible. While some sites say they will honor your request to have your profile deleted, they steer you toward "claiming" your profile and making corrections to it instead. Even then, you have limited control over the content and the way it is presented.
More . . . (http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1649121,00.html)
8-2-07
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1649121,00.html
As recently as six months ago, online snooping was mostly done surreptitiously or under the polite guise of "social networking." Now all subtlety has been cast aside. An estimated 30% of all Web searches are aimed at finding people, according to industry statistics, and upstarts like PeekYou, Pipl, Spock, and Wink are vying for a piece of this potentially huge market. These free sites work by scouring the Web for any virtual footprints you might have on MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Yahoo!, Flickr and elsewhere, and then creating a fresh profile that organizes all that information on one page. Even Whitepages.com recently expanded its phone listings to include business addresses and other contact information culled from all sorts of mail-order marketing lists and business directories.
What makes these sites controversial is that they gather all this information without your permission. The resulting profiles can be embarrassing or simply wrong. And getting those profiles removed or changed can be impossible. While some sites say they will honor your request to have your profile deleted, they steer you toward "claiming" your profile and making corrections to it instead. Even then, you have limited control over the content and the way it is presented.
More . . . (http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1649121,00.html)