Peeking at PeekYou`s People Search - What Happens When You’re a Celebrity
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Being the kind of science fan that I am, I started with Stephen Hawking. An all countries search returned seven results; knowing that he’s currently teaching in the UK, I focused on that. The search returned one link. Did I strike gold? Ummm…not exactly. The link led eventually to a MySpace profile that was clearly fake.
Okay, so would we do better with George Bush? Surely the current U.S. president would be easy for PeekYou to find! Again, the answer was “not quite.” It returned 743 results. Okay, so how about if we narrow down the region? Well, if you have USA on the first drop-down, PeekYou does list all 50 states – but not the District of Columbia.
I tried limiting it to Texas – Bush’s home state – and saw 10 results. There was no way to tell which one, if any, was for George Bush, because every last one of them had an accurate picture of the president next to them. I would have had to check them all, and still had no guarantee that I found the right one.
Before you say that this would not be a common problem for the less-than-famous, consider how many names are very common. I put the name of our CTO, Rich Smith, into PeekYou. I even specified the state. I got back 20 results. Two of them, for Fort Lauderdale, linked to the exact same MySpace profile, which I could tell at a glance wasn’t him. A third one, for Miami, linked to a different MySpace profile, which also wasn’t him. None of the other ones were even close.
Ah, but what about William Shatner? PeekYou returned six results; if we can believe the picture, the second one was the one we were looking for. Here’s what we got, which is pretty much what you’d get for any profile you click on, differing only in details:
Across the top, you can see places to click to fix a misspelled name, to add/edit a location, add a username, report abuse, and add a link. Apparently, you can also get an RSS feed of the profile, and a click on the link for “page history” takes you to a page that shows you all the changes that have been made to the profile.
Under the picture you’ll see buttons for tags, report abuse, add tag, and “what is this?” Clicking on that last one gives you a pop-up box that explains what a tag is and what good tag form is; it also gives examples of good and bad tags. You can’t submit a tag unless you are a member.
Not visible in this profile (because I cropped it) is a shoutbox. You can use it to post whatever you want to, so long as it relates to the profile you are viewing. All shoutbox comments are policed by PeekYou admins, and they won’t permit “abusive/irrelevant/spam comments.” The link in William Shatner’s profile, by the way, appears to lead to a legitimate MySpace page for the Star Trek actor.
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