Online Snooping Gets Creepy – TIME
Online Snooping Gets Creepy – TIME: is this fucking 1999? God damn these magazines and alarmist, old, poorly researched shit stories.
blackrimglasses.com
Online Snooping Gets Creepy – TIME: is this fucking 1999? God damn these magazines and alarmist, old, poorly researched shit stories.
So easy to attack someone online, so much work to bother defending your argument. These sites didn’t even exist in 1999. Spock and PeekYou, for example, are still in beta. And judging by the huge interest in my story, the debate about privacy is alive and well. Hardly old hat, as you suggest.
Sites like Spoke and Peek You not existing in 1999? Where did you get that from? 1999 did not have the promiscuous exchange of data nor open standards of data we have 8 years later, but sites such as these in terms of their mission did exist. BigYellow, peoplesearch, sixdegrees, etc.
Media likes to be alarmist (witness the Fox stories on “anonymous users”). I used to work in media, so am guilty of the same, and wrote a story pretty much like yours in 1999.
Privacy has been an issue in the U.S. ever since our country was founded (that’s why they put the 4th amendment in the constitution). So while the topic of privacy and even online privacy is an evergreen, new developments make it newsworthy. That doesn’t make reporting on those developments alarmist — it’s simply reporting a new twist in the ongoing privacy debate.
As for the 1999 reference, my point is that these new services take the basic functionality offered by even your examples of Big Yellow and SixDegrees one step further. It’s an exponential leap in snoopiness because it copies then consolidates all this info (often culled from painfully dated sources that not even a Google search will display because they are so irrelevant) on a page that you have very little say in — all while pretending that you do by letting you “claim” your page.