Cryptosmith

Curt Monash has discovered that he’s a member of the JLove dating service - without being asked. Apparently JLove scrapes web sites for peoples’ names and constructs fake memberships for them to artificially inflate the JLove membership base. Curt has identified at least one blogger who was apparently misled by such an entry.

Perhaps Curt isn’t married, but if so I expect his wife would be annoyed with him participating in a dating web site (mine would be very annoyed, and I wouldn’t blame her a bit).

Curt’s proposed solution is to have everyone establish their own presence on the web rather than allowing it to be preempted by automated web crawlers. That would certainly make life easier.

On the other hand, knowledgeable Internet users can develop an eye for distinguishing real content from robot-generated nonsense sites. I know I have - perhaps that’s worth discussion by itself.

I can appreciate that a lot of people value their privacy too much to want to splash their affairs all over the Internet. I admit I find it annoying not to be able to track down someone I want to find (like the first book editor I worked with, whose only apparent web presence is in scraped sites).

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