PEEK'd You! - Volume 1

I recently found this site called peekyou.com. The sites says its basic premise is to "search for and find people online...to access all Internet links related to actual people like you." Well that statement couldn't be more true. What peekyou.com does is take all the information from social networking sites such as Myspace & Friendster, then adds in information from anything else where your name appears on the net (specific site names based on info peekyou displays). This includes public records online that shows your info. The "skinny" is this: you can type in any person and see all the information about then that-seemly-has ever been online. 

Why is this bad? To start, you can type in a persons name: find an image of them; find what jobs that have had, or what job they currently have; find out there likes dislikes; blogs they've written; and find out where they live, all in one location. Now we know that this information is out there, but it is twisted to put it all together. Most users of social networks proliferate little difference on their profile, maybe for style sake, or maybe or security reasons. 

-Social sites are a very interesting concept. I have always viewed them as a way of seeing what old friends are doing and exposing my art to a large community. For me it is clear that a persona is created on these sites. You post the "best" photo of yourself, provide the "best" information about yourself, and try to keep up a certain image for your friends to perceive. Mind you what is posted provides a limited scope of reality no matter how diligent one is with their updates. So when one post something it is with the intent to promote only one side of yourself for hopeful social gain. Also, when placing things on these sites a profile is called and referred to as "your profile" and thus when posting you are providing content that is yours and assumably protected by you. 

Peekyou.com dives into some bad practices that should worry users and nonusers. In addition to taking unauthorized information-for which I will discuss below-peekyou.com allows for searching of people under the age of 18. This means that sicko's can go to one place to hunt their prey. As we know the younger generation is very liberal with their information and are very effected by the interaction of other on  social networks (Megan Meier). Provided all information can easily give an advantage to the twisted members on society. From the beginning social networks were a dangerous place for children. Now there is  a culmination of a very huge problem. Our kids can be searched and found anywhere at anytime. The site gives easy access to searching by schools. Within the search bar it clearly states "school, college or University name. Why would they seperate school and college? Seems that school would be simple enough, but their is clearly an illustration of something other than college. Which you can only imaging, would be a useful tool for the deranged. 

How bad can this thing get? Well I have searched a wide variety of people I know and have found  a lot of their information (excluded accurate home addresses). My own profile proved to be very frightening steeling a (copyrighted) photo from friendster.com. The location on the map given for me is close to where I once lived.

What can be done? Well there is a legality that is pretty clear. Peekyou.com gives you the following options: 

Sharing of Public Profile Information

All information that is contributed by our Users for inclusion in their public Profiles, in addition to that collected by us from public Web sources, will be available to PeekYou and anyone using the PeekYou Site and other PeekYou services. If you would like us to remove your Profile from our service, send an e-mail to remove@peekyou.com with your request and the Web address of your Profile, and we will gladly remove your information.

Then they followup with: 

NOTE: Most of the information that PeekYou displays can already be found on any public search engine. Because the Web is constantly changing, and we search millions of new and old Web pages every day, we may re-acquired your information unintentionally. We recommend that you check our Site from time to time to ensure that your Profile contains only the information you choose to have displayed, and that we have not re-posted previously deleted information. The best way to avoid having your information found by our search engine (or any other search engine) is to contact the operator of the Site that contains the original source(s) of the information and ask for that operator to remove the displayed information from the Web.

-Oh great now I have to constantly ask you not to put all my information all together. Some public information is not by choice, a good example of this is the news and celebrity pages-which are not news. Plus a something could be posted that has very personal information, like your credit card or social number. Then your a victim not by one site but by peekyou.com.

In their terms they refer to the United States Copyright Act Designation, which we all know clarifies how things can be used. Most notable in the Act is that images and other intellectual property cannot use for advertising purposes without permission. Peekyou.com site advertising is your personal information-posted somewhere by or of you.  An enticement to the site is that your friends have profiles, even if they didn't make it themselves. Peekyou.com uses your image as their "bottle shot" or "car shot". We are their advertising. It should be noted that most social network (friendster & myspace) have limited rights to any property that one posts. This includes particular information on a blogs or profiles such as: photos, writing, name (maybe), age (maybe), & artwork. So in the case of peekyou.com taking your information and re-categorizing it on it's own website is a violation of your intellectual property. Specifically if peekyou.com uses a photo from a website, they have to ask the artist permission for usage.  Copyright Issues peekyou.com can be contacted at:

Attn: Copyright Agent
PeekYou LLC
265 West 37th St,
New York, NY 10018

Mind you I'd love to say that I am an intelletual property lawyer, but I am not. If your information has been highjacked by peekyou.com and peekyou.com does not comply, you should consult a lawyer. I would love suggestions on how we can solve weird sites like peekyou.com.