Astonishing! Spock Thinks You're a Pedophile

[Ian David]

Astonishing! Spock Thinks You're a Pedophile
By Dan Tynan Email 08.15.07 | 2:00 AM

Spock, a search engine for finding people, mixes search with social-networking tools like personal profiles and tagging. But you don't have to join to have a profile on Spock. In fact, you may be shocked to see what your profile says about you.

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These kids have a few things in common: They, along with 12,000 other people, recently downloaded a "Mad Libs"-like Facebook application and wrote stories about themselves and their friends, filling the blanks with scandalous terms.

But they didn't realize the application was created by Spock, which debuted last week. And they were horrified to discover that Spock used the terms they supplied to build public profiles on them and other Facebook members. (After being contacted by Wired News, Spock erased the tags from many of these profiles, but some were still visible at press time.)

It's not just fun and games. If you searched Spock for the tag "pedophile" last week, blogger John Aravosis' profile would have shown up near the top. The proprietor of the popular Americablog has written extensively about former Congressman Mark Foley. The profile was automatically created by the Spock bot, which crawled sites associated with Aravosis.

More:
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/news/2007/08/spock_reputation

[frylock]

1. fascinating