No man was more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, or more wise when he had - Samuel Johnson
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Inflection outbreak could hit privacy
A STORY in the New York Times has us putting our 'delete Internet accounts' doomsday clock up to 11:59:58, introducing as it does Inflection - which sounds as scary as a sneezing, drooling rabid monkey.
According to the NYT, Inflection is launching something called Peoplesmart, which aims to be a people search engine and sounds like a social notworking service too far.
Like Soylent Green, the Inflection social networking searcher is all about people, and it aims to do to online presences what the old style phone book used to do to your physical location - that is, put your name and a number to it.
The NYT said that Inflection is unleashing PeopleSmart today, and cautioned that it "mines public records as well as social networking profiles to build an online directory of people". This means that it is being loosed onto the Internet like a personal data snuffling cockroach and then provides, for a fee of course, information that is already publicly available on other websites.
It is not all about spidering social notworking services though. There are people prepared to act on request too, and while users can choose to pay $2.95 a month or $9.95 for 24-hour access, non-intrusive and perfectly acceptable things like reverse cellphone look-ups cost extra.
The Inflection website is live now. We resisted the lure of the tagline "People search & background checks by name, phone, email or address". µ
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Thank you for this wonderful piece of news. I am so happy to chalk up yet another reason to keep as far away as possible from all that "social" malarky.
HR drones all over the world are going to have a field day though - probably why it was made in the first place.
I can tell that "tentimes" is completely unbiased and is not in any way affiliated with the subject of this story. I trust his words completely!
Yes. Yes! YES! You should absolutely HAVE to pay to search for information that is already completely open and FREE on the internet.
Now that's an excellent idea. Here, let me get out my credit card.
I use Amazon Turk to earn a few extra quid when I'm bored, and I have had several "HiTS" testing this technology.
It works, and it does track peope down. Essentially it is one simple page, you enter the details and it has an uncanny way of coming up with your personal details, including phone number.
I don't think it's in any way secret, as the HITs are open to just about anyone working Amazon Turk.
At present I see no functionality to remove yourself from the database.