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Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Unsettling
It has been a while since I did a Google search of my own name (I'm not that narcissistic...), but a couple days ago my girlfriend and I decided to throw my name in and see what came up. That is how I first discovered the disconcerting website known as PeekYou. It apparently trawls the web looking for freely available information about someone, and then compiles this into a people index. I'm not sure where it got its information about me, but it knows my name and hometown (which, for some reason, it also thinks is my location). It also knows I'm male and gives my age at 22 (off by a couple... I'm not sure why). Then it has a strange line of 'descriptors' in which it says, "Student canadian atheist". While I am annoyed grammatically at the capitalization of student and corresponding lack of capitalization for Canadian, I'm also confused at how it found those three seemingly random bits of information out, and nothing else. Now I'm going to be wondering all day just where on the internet this thing found me...
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2 comments:
It looks like it's similar to a search engine bot. It ain't got shit on me! Incidentally, there's a whoooooole lotta people with the same name as me in California, like more than all the other locations combined, what's up with that?
Perhaps your name is common in the software industry (or movie or strawberry growing industries...)? Otherwise, maybe it's found the same person from California more than once? Since it cannot seem to get my age correct, perhaps it cannot distinguish conflicting pieces of information.
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