For over a month, I have been sitting on a post about people search, wondering how to tie some of those thoughts together. The news that Facebook was going to open up itself up to search (see Techmeme discussion) makes me glad I waited, although the following has only passing resemblance to the original post.

The thought of writing on people search first came about in the context of Spock, a dedicated people search engine, which has also received some buzz in the recent past. This was about the time when Facebook shared its thoughts on search and the first thing that came to mind was whether Facebook should acquire Spock. One does a great job of indexing people and the other has a great index of people. With the new move, which will allow non-Facebook users to find people on Facebook, I wonder if the other direction, i.e. Facebook users finding people via a vertical people search engine might not be attractive.

As a Facebook user, I have somewhat mixed feelings. The cozy feeling of privacy within friends was somewhat comforting, and a reason that some people I know use Facebook (or Vox which has great privacy controls). The privacy aspects struck me when a friend of mine was surprised when he learned that I had found his name, with appropriate tags, on Spock and had confirmed that this was indeed who that person was. The question that arises is this. Does Spock, or any other people search engine, have the right to grab a name from a social network like LinkedIn and put it up there without the person knowing about it? I personally don’t care, since you can find me spattered all over the web anyway, but I know enough people who do care. What are our expectations of privacy? Stefanie Olsen brings up some very pertinent points in a similar vein. In Facebook’s case, people can opt out of being searched. Perhaps this will have to become a general practice for social networks and any place that aggregates people information. They will need to make the decision (a) should user information be searchable and (b) if yes, what safeguards should the user have in place?

While the focus is on People Search, lets not forget the search engines. The rest of the world may not know about Facebook or Spock, but they do know Google.

Perhaps all we need to do is follow the social bill of rights or just listen to Vanessa Fox