Have you heard of the people search engine called Spock?

[thewayne]

You might want to look up your name on it. They stealthily got a bunch of MySpace users to fill out a sniglets-like app and it then used their responses to populate profiles on their search engine.

Frighteningly, it had a lot of entries for my name, none of them me. But the first response was someone in Phoenix that had some scary associations with my past, none of which actually connected to me: this guy is a car painter apparently.

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

Comments

[ateji.livejournal.com]

Glad to see there's nothing under my real name. At least five people showing up on it, though. Heh.

[fastlearner.livejournal.com]

First thing I did when I heard of it was look myself up, and was happy to find that the real me wasn't there.

My daughter's there, though, and I learned something about her I didn't know, something pretty personal. Kinda spooky.

[kylejcrb.livejournal.com]

Apparently 17 other people share my name. I'm on there, from when I had a profile on MySpace awhile ago. I literally never used the thing and forgot about it not long after I made it, but there's not much on there about myself personally anyway. I don't even recall filling out any application, just the generic MySpace profile, and I didn't even fill out everything. I guess that's enough though.

[cteare.livejournal.com]

Luckily, I don't show up at all. I've never had a MySpace account.

[deborak]

There's only one other person with my name, and they seem far more respectable than I am (Rutgers graduate living in Bend, OR). They'd better hope never to get mixed up with me. :D