Not So Relevant

Discussion on People Search Engines in Germany

It is not really news that German people - and also citizens of other European countries - are often more concerned about privacy than US American citizens. People seem to be more suspicious of anything and anyone that could possibly collect personal data and use it for commercial purposes, e.g. a German guy started an initiative called OpenID - Nein Danke (OpenID - No Thanks) a few months ago because OpenID providers had the opportunity to create profiles about customers since they knew all the websites users logged in with their OpenID. So it comes as no surprise that a people search engine like Spock is seen critically over here.

German news magazine Focus has published an AFP article on Spock on its website on Tuesday. It is called Detektei für den Hausgebrauch (Detective Agency for Domestic Use). The article is fairly neutral and basically quotes Spock’s Jay Bhatti on how the service is working; privacy concerns are shortly mentioned. There is one comment on the article, though, which made me smile but is also demonstrating some people’s ignorance. The commenter thinks sites like Spock were just feeding people’s curiosity to discover negative aspects of other people’s life. By reading the comment it is obvious that he/she never actually visited the site.

The article was also mentioned on German blog Fischmarkt. The article on Fischmarkt is called Menschensuchmaschine. While people search engine can be literally translated that way the word has a rather negative connotation and reminds me more of manhunt. All in all it’s a rather ironic article challenging Spock’s promises to delete wrong information.

I don’t want to neglect privacy issues and I think people search engines have to be very transparent on how they gain information and how they store and process it but the comment on the Focus article as well as the Fischmarkt article make me wonder if it’s really possible to establish an open and unbiased discussion about people search engines, profile aggregation and whatnot over here.

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