spockisatrocious's dashboard

When I say "private" I also include publicly available info that is not associated with the identity of the individual it's about. For example, if you didn't reveal your identity on your blog, but you did reveal a bunch of non-identifying facts about yourself that were available other places on the web where those facts were associated with your identity, Spock could form the probable conclusion that the two individuals were the same individual. Then Spock could include further facts you reveal about yourself on the anonymous blog on your Spock page. I'm not saying Spock does this, but it's possible and would explain how they got info about me from my myspace page which, as far as I know, has never been associated with my name. Make sense?

This should be a source of concern for Spock, since while California law protects companies like Spock from libel suits when the false info they present is only pulled from elsewhere online, the law doesn't protect them if they compile false info on an individual from some places where that false info is not presented as being about the individual. If they do this, they've gone beyond merely showing what's elsewhere on the web. – LetsSueSpock, on August 05, 2008 00:28

LetsSueSpock: What I'm asking is, how would Spock take information from private sites? They're private -- it's not like Spock has an all-access pass to the Internet. When it crawls the Internet, it's just like you surfing it, but faster. One scenario that could reflect what you're talking about is if a public profile has been recently privatized. Say I had a MySpace profile that was public, and now I make that page private. Spock will have it there until it crawls MySpace again and sees that the profile has become private. There are two actions I can take at this point: if the profile is mine, I can request that it be taken down. If not, I can rest assured that Spock is working hard to refresh its index and take care of the problem. If you have an actual example of what you mentioned that you don't think falls into this scenario, I'd be interested to see it. – catgofire, on August 04, 2008 19:18

Don'tlikespock. If you would like to be removed from Spock please the question thread - Remove me from Spock! With regards to your other comments, as noted above, Spock is a search engine that works similar to Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc in that we crawl and index publish publicly available information. One of the many advantages of Spock is that we enable people to take control of their search result and remove any irrelevant tags, web links, pictures, etc. We are well aware that people don't necessarily display everything about themselves, which is why we enable people to claim their search result. Still, at the end of the day it's really up to a person to be aware of their web presence and what is made available about them (if you don't want information shown than you shouldn't display or post it- or at least make sure it's private) – I Love Spock, on August 04, 2008 17:21

(2nd try. Couldn't tell if first posted. They didn't ask for validation, etc.)

Catgofire, you are a wise-ass. Nobody likes a wise-ass. And unfortunately for you, you are not wise, which just makes you an ass.

Catgofire says:

"If it's not public, how did Spock get it? It's not like Spock broke into your house and stole your information"

How could Spock get info that's not public? By taking it from private sites, you idiot. No one here should be presuming that what Spock is doing is ethical. Here's one way Spock could obtain private info about individuals. They code algorithms that correlate info publicly associated with someone with similar info associated with someone whose identity is private. If the correlation between the two sets of info matches to a sufficiently high degree, they can make a probabilistic assumption that the private someone is the same person as the other public someone. Easy as pie. What do you think they employ all their scientists for?

Catgofire also said:

"... Everything on Spock is from somewhere else (public) on the Internet."

This is of course false, and easy to demonstrate as such. To test whether info on Spock is public, just copy a statistically improbable phrase from the suspected private info on a Spock page and Google it. If Google ONLY shows that phrase on the Spock page you copied it from, then obviously Spock is getting the info from someplace that you, a member of the public, can't get it from. Such info then is clearly not public info.

Somebody needs to file a class-action lawsuit and shut these MFs down. – LetsSueSpock, on August 04, 2008 16:52

and its kind of odd how none of the employees here don't have their birth dates and where exactly they live like the rest of us do. I guess you guys like your privacy too! take me off your website IMMEDIATELY

you have a horrible website you are advertising information that you have no right to! someone should report you to the cops and i think the media should do a story about how horrible you are!

THIS WEBSITE SUCKS. HOW DARE YOU POST INFORMATION THAT IS MARKED PRIVATE ON MYSPACE. I HOPE YOU ALL GET SUED.

Hi,

I just wanted to let you know that deletion has been a little buggy for the past month which might explain the delay. However you should note that Google is separate from Spock, so even if your Spock search result has been removed, it may take a little while for Google to reindex.

My suggestion (assuming you've claimed your search result) is that you vote down the links and tags that are no longer relevant about you. This will remove the incorrect information while your search result is in the process of being removed.

spock sucks! I been trying to delete my account for the past month and still find my information when i search my name on google. I placed all my social accounts as private, and some how spock still have my old friendster information up. I been flagging for deletion of my account and it still has not happened. Do I need to contact BBB for some real action?

You can email Spock at info@corp.spock.com with the URL of your search result and they'll remove it. If your information is personal, it should be made private.