Agency? If I understand this process correctly, *I* could be gathering
all this information, if I could program a crawler robot and I really
wanted to fill a gig drive with URLs. Ditto for any person with a
computer in any country on the planet. Then I could sell it to anybody I
wanted to -- say, the prospective employers of all you people :)
Seriously: when you've got employers so desperate for any clue about their
future employees that they're submitting them to hideously invasive
psychological profile tests and _handwriting analysis_, for godsakes
(especially in perplexingly nonscientific countries like France), it seems
like one could make a nice living running an Altavista-like service that
didn't respect robot barricades. For $10, I'll give you everything your
candidate has ever posted to the world in any forum; supposedly
"nonarchived" mailing lists are handled through stealth subscriptions to
everything in sight via dummy addresses. Not only is this physically
possible, it's completely legal. And if it becomes illegal, just do it
from the Caymans.
And if the volume becomes too great (for example, I got something like
5000 hits for "Evan Kirchhoff" on Altavista [who knew? I thought I had
relatively obscure names], at least several hundred of which seem to be
the work of the present author), why not form something analogous to the
credit-rating agencies that keep careful tabs on how often I've forgotten
to pay my phone bill? For $225, this hypothetical UberVista would produce
a topic/content profile of your online behaviour, obtained by getting some
$4/hour student wage-slave (sorry, "symbol-processing third-wave knowledge
worker") to skim through your posts and see if they're about Nazis or pipe
bombs; irony may be difficult to perceive at a reading-rate of 1000 wpm,
but what the heck, TRW can't get your credit reports accurate either, and
they're making a nice little pile of money.
-- Evan Kirchhoff, kirchh@umich.edu