Your secrets are out there

We’d better all start leading whiter than white lives if we want to get jobs and credit in the future. VentureBeat today reports on a new Chinese “people search” company called Ucloo that aims to build a comprehensive online database of personal profiles – including the person’s name, birthday, contact information, education, work background, pictures, online activity, reputation and court records. And it’s not the only such company out there. A US company, Spock, is doing much the same thing and says it already has 100 million profiles (compare that to LinkedIn‘s nine million user-created profiles). Zoominfo, focused on information about business execs, has been around for a while and claims 33 million profiles.

The argument in favor of these people search engines is that they are only collating information that is already out there if you googled hard enough. True, but the information is not being used for the purpose for which is was originally supplied. I’m the type of person who doesn’t sign up for customer loyalty programs because I don’t think the supermarket needs to know about my shopping habits – so you can imagine how I feel about this phenomenon. I see a booming future for companies like Reputation Defenders…

Technorati Tags: Ucloo, online privacy, Reputation Defenders