An intresting article landed above my gmail inbox this morning. At Rapleaf, your personals are public. Definatly something that caught my attention, just because in a world of privacy statements and security systems inplemented into the internet it seems a little off skelter.

RAPLEAF

So I gave it a go. It took my email address and told me to come back in an hour. The system would then scan the internet for where my email would appear – myspace, facebook, flickr and anything else it wants to scan. If my email address appears in those, then it reports back to me where that address appears online.

I tried it with John’s as well. It only showed up his amazon wishlist. But something like that – a personal site aggregator – is an intresting idea. Basically scanning websites for your personal data. I do wonder how this all ads up…

• How do the privacy statements for all these sites they retrieve data from fit in with somebody taking and displaying it for all to see?
• Is that fact that our data is available to be scanned in breach of their privacy agreements we accepted?
• Will these companies secure our data further to stop this kind of aggregation?
• Is it their data to protect or ours?
• Does that mean that we can be found just by our email address – if so how much of our identity does that simple email carry?
• Where does that leave us, and the ten of thousands of bots that have our email addresses for spam?

It may seem a little alarmist. But the internet just became a little smaller and a little more unsecure.

I guess the last question is:
What year will the robots take over the world?