Spock scares the daylights out of me
After seeing The Bourne Ultimatum (TBU) today and visiting the next generation website, Spock, I am officially concerned.TBU was a good movie about espionage and the US of A. How one man brought down a black-ops department that was killing off US citizens amongst others. Nice concept, realistic implementation of core spy concepts surrounding the CIA, NSA, ASAP, RSVP and any other acronym you can think of. Cool stuff.But then I stumble upon (yet again) Spock. I have visited Spock before but had a bad feeling about the core idea behind this website.From the site:
Spock is the online leader in personal search, helping users find and discover people. With over one hundred million people already indexed and millions added every day, Spock is building the broadest and deepest people specific search engine.
Over a hundred-flipping-million people categorised already? That is frightening stuff if it is true. I am not naive, I am well aware of the fact that my information is online and anyone who wants to find me can, it's not particularly difficult.Today I revisited my Spock experience and I am terribly frightened. In essence my experience of Spock is one of personal indexing. What I mean by this is that they subtly ask you to add information about yourself by answering some questions. Questions such as what colour hair you have, where you were born and what colour eyes you have are standard. I don't like giving out this information. I am not being forced to at all, but the concept makes me uncomfortable.I am now searchable among 100 000 000 other people. That's a lot of people.Now let's get paranoid for a second. Lets assume that the Spock website is funded by a company, Clearstone Venture Partners who's CEO could possibly be (in some far off parallel reality) related to the director of a special operation within the CIA. Now this gent in the CIA has direct access to over 100 000 000 people on the spock website. That scares me. It scares me when I think about passport restrictions being whispered around the world. It scares me when I think about Arabs in the UK and US and the types of lives they are being forced to lead thanks to the colour of their skin and place of their birth. It scares me to think that the only people who are safe are those who have never touched the internet or anything to do with a network of any sorts. It saddens me to think of the possible impact that this sort of website could have on all online pundits and enthusiasts alike.I am interested to see where Spock goes. Lastly, what's with that name, Spock?
