Constructing a mnemonic circuit using stone knives and bearskins

by David Holtzman

spock.jpg
Spock is the name of a new web2.0 company that uses technology to solve a problem that's only been partially solved--finding people. What they attempt to do is to disambiguate the multiple person-one name problem. They do this by using what I consider a pretty sound approach--use software to initially populate the database, then enlist the great unwashed, the webtwofer types, to refine the data.

So Google does do this, but it's oriented along the lines of pure content retrieval, it's not looking for people, but stuff. If the stuff is organized along people lines, great, otherwise you get non-standard results. What we want I think, is to search on a person's name and get the most famous or well-known person, not the first one on Google's search list. So Michael Jackson the musician, not Michael Jackson the beer expert.

(Technical note: We actually want neither of those approaches--we really want a context-driven search based on who we, the searcher are. If I'm a beergeek, then I do want the 2nd Michael Jackson. Neither Spock nor Google can do that.)

I haven't actually seen Spock work myself, but I would like to play with the beta. By the way, they're having a moneyed contest to help them with some technical stuff. More info here.

In theory, this should work, although I wonder about the practice. It's like the Wikipedia situation, do we really think that hordes of anonymous people can actually cook an omelet or just break a lot of eggs? I also wonder how difficult it would be for Google to add this capability to their engine, thus killing Spock yet again. Still It will be interesting to see how they do.


Posted on April 19, 2007

1 Comment
Technology

I've signed up for a Spock.com invitation for one reason - I want to know what information will be available about me, and just how badly my right to privacy will be violated by this new site. To quote a news.com article linked to from Spock.com:

"Spock, a start-up that wants to make it easier to find personal information about people on the web ..."

Excuse me for obsessing on reality when everybody else is getting ecstatic, but isn't that pretty much what privacy violation is? So why is this a good thing? Reading further, we find that rather than just relying on the "great unwashed" to fill their data base, spock.com is going to rely on "publicly available information". Judging from what has already been seen from sites like privateeye.com, you might be surprised at how much that includes, much of it coming from governmental agencies which one is not free to withhold information from.

For example, try getting around the state of Illinois without a driver's license or a state ID card. If one gets stopped by the police for any reason at all, including one as stupid as the cop feeling that "your kind" needs to be kept on its toes, failure to produce identification can get one arrested. One can't apply for work, cash a check, travel by plane - really, do much of anything, so one really isn't free to not apply for that identification. Yet the secretary of state's office feels completely free to give out the information individuals submit to get that identification without concerning itself with whether or not the individual whose personal information gets divulged wants it to be or not, and if they should end up helping a stalker find his target in the process? "Hey, s**t happens."

What does that do to one's privacy and how consensual is the loss, really? What sites like spock.com are doing is taking the government's abuse of our right to privacy and isolated incidences of private companies (eg. the Ameritech incident connected to with my homepage link) and individuals abusing their access to confidential information and in turning what would have been temporary leaks into a permanent ones in some cases, making those abuses go viral. Illinois and other states doing what it does with involuntarily surrendered information need to be slapped down hard, preferably with the passage of some badly needed and long overdue federal laws - individual rights should trump states rights - but getting the states that divulge personal information without specific prior consent to cease and desist from doing so will do no good if the information wrongly put into circulation is not removed from circulation.

Am I interested in this new site? Try concerned, and considering whether or not I should be infuriated.

Posted by Joseph Dunphy on April 25, 2007

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