Identify: Google People With Two Keystrokes
There's a lot of information about many of us spread around the web and though privacy is important to discuss - there's also another side of that coin. It can be very useful to tie together info from disparate sources about a particular individual.
Context & Ripple Effects
The idea of searching one’s own name was already familiar in 2007, when coverage noted that people were increasingly Googling themselves. Identify packages that behavior into a faster people-search service that aggregates information scattered across the web.
The utility case sits alongside the privacy concern raised by earlier scrutiny of who is looking up whom on Google. Identify makes publicly available traces easier to assemble, sharpening that trade-off.
First-order effects
- People using Identify can locate and aggregate web information about an individual with less manual searching, while the individuals being searched become more readily legible through their public traces.
Second-order effects
- People-search and general search providers face greater pressure to distinguish useful public-data discovery from collection practices that users experience as invasive.
Third-order effects
- If aggregation tools become a standard layer over public web data, privacy debates will increasingly turn on the permission boundary between information being available and it being easy to compile.
The trend: People search is moving from isolated name queries toward services that assemble dispersed public information into a single profile-like view.