Social networks and personal identity and data aggregation companies are increasingly betraying the privacy, beliefs and rights of individuals, as recently demonstrated by ChoicePoint selling fraudulent access to 100,000s of individuals' private financial and other data, and described below with South Korean search service provider Lycos selling access to 1,000,000s of personal dating profiles aggregated from many private dating websites... which in fact is just a bait and switch operation for Lycos and dating site operators' to profit off lonely people. In another subversive way, Amazon.com aggregates individuals' buying preferences and opinions as part of their core business, and more recently is funding apparently unrelated social networking to learn your "43 Things". Results: ChoicePoint sold con-men 100,000+ identities - Lycos is selling personal profile data most people assume is held within trusting social communities - Amazon owns your preferences, hopes and dreams. Without regard to individuals' rights, Amazon, ChoicePoint and Lycos pursue only profits. Such abuse of individual rights by data aggregators and networking schemes is far from isolated, and will surface as one of the greatest new economy challenges of our time, defining who has the right to own and profit from the personal data of individuals. REALNEO believes this right should remain with individuals. What do you think... read on:

Lycos launches dating search engine

By Juan Carlos Perez

Lycos Inc. is making it easier for lonely hearts to find their
soulmates online. The company will launch on Wednesday a search engine
that only indexes dating Web sites, giving users links to personal
profiles found at iMatchup.com Inc., LoveAccess.com Inc., Tickle Inc., True.com and Lycos' own Matchmaker.com.

"We did research last year and it revealed that (online) dating
customers want a robust and efficient way for searching for dates
online," said Curt Degenhart, a Lycos senior product manager.

Lycos Dating Search, as the search engine is called, contains
millions of profiles and photos, and Lycos is in the process of
striking deals with other online dating providers, he said. The site is
at http://datingsearch.lycos.com and there will be a link to it from the main Lycos portal and from other sites on the Lycos network, he said.

Lycos is indexing the full text of the profiles it receives from the
dating Web sites, providing in some cases more extensive search
capabilities of their content than is possible at the dating sites
themselves, Degenhart said.

Lycos Dating Search index will be refreshed on a daily basis, and use of the search engine is free, he said.

After a user runs a query, Lycos Dating Search returns portions
of the profiles it finds. To read the full profile, users can click on
the search result, which takes them to the original dating site.

Users arriving at the original dating sites from Lycos Dating
Search get access to the full text of the profiles even if those
profiles are normally not accessible to users who aren't dating-site
subscribers, he said. There are no limits to the number of profiles
Lycos Dating Search users can view.

Lycos Dating Search provides a variety of features and parameters to frame and narrow queries.

Lycos, a Waltham, Massachusetts-based subsidiary of South Korean
Web portal operator Daum Communications Corp., will generate revenue in
a number of ways from Lycos Dating Search. Lycos will sell online ads
and charge partner dating sites fees. For example, partners will pay
Lycos every time a Lycos Dating Search user clicks through to their
site and/or every time a user signs up for their service, Degenhart
said.

Posted February 23, 2005 04:55 PM |