18 to 24 Insight: Spock (A Social Networking Aggregator) is Spooky

Because MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, Friendster, Wikipedia, IMDB and NNDB weren’t enough, Spock, a beta website, searches the Internet to compile all public information about you and everyone you know. Spock, named for the acronym, “single point of contact (by) keyword” could have been more accurately named “Spook,” because it’s downright creepy.

Founded in 2006 by Jay Bhatti and Jaideep Singh, Spock searches social networks, news sites, blogs, directories and just about anywhere to compile information on individuals. Chances are that if you don’t think you have a Spock profile, you do. The good news is that if you do indeed have a Spock profile, you can claim it as your own and add or remove information as you see fit. You may also choose to cancel your account altogether but Spock warns that if you haven’t signed up for Spock, you need to remove all public information, such as your LinkedIn Profile or MySpace page. This is because Spock continually “crawls” the Internet for publicly available information. So, unless you register for Spock, it will continue to aggregate public information. And you can’t do anything about it. It’s as if users are blackmailed into registration.

I found Spock when I Googled a reality show contestant. Her Spock profile looked identical to her MySpace page. That’s when I discovered how Spock was an aggregator of public information on everyone from Angelina Jolie right down to John Doe (Is that really that guy’s name?) You can imagine how surprised I was to find my own Spock Profile; one, which I hadn’t created, yet somehow knew that I was female and a native of Brooklyn, New York. Since the information was accurate, I let it be. A few weeks later, a friend requested my “trust” on Spock and I opted to sign up and build my own profile, before Spock did the rest for me.

Upon signing in, Spock invited me to discover what my friends were doing on the web. Somehow, I suppose based on my email address book, browsing history or tags, Spock knows whom I know and shows me their profiles. But Spock isn’t all that omnipotent. If you share a name with anyone else who has an online presence, Spock can get confused and lump you all together. In my case, Spock thinks I am two, different people and I’ve been trying unsuccessfully for a month to have my profiles merged. A friend was tagged as someone’s grandfather when he is indeed not. I voted against the relevancy of the tag but it remains active.

The MediaPost blog lists several of Spock’s features and adds why they are unique among the growing sea of social networking aggregators. Much like the real world, your Spock popularity awards you a greater authority. Your “Spock Power” number is based on your activity and trust level. Co-founder, Jay Bhatti, has a Spock Power of nearly 350,000. At the writing of this blog, my Spock Power is 20. So that probably explains why I can’t seem to merge my profiles or effectively vote against tags. The so-called “Robot” which crawls the web for information has a score of 1, thereby making any registered user at least slightly more powerful than the almighty Spock robot.

Spock Robot has its very own profile. Some of its tags are “finds way too much information,” “web stalker” and “hates privacy.” To each of these tags, I voted “yes.”