Kevin Kelly writes about how a social networking site called JASEZone created a fake profile page about him and started spamming his contacts.
It's a bold and brazen ponzi scheme. I did not register with JaseZone, nor invite anyone. The material was scraped from other sources. They have my age wrong. The picture is from the web, and out of date (I've had a beard for 8 years). It is a lie that I "last login on January 14, 2008" since I have never logged in. My "friends" listed on the page are vacuous, just place-holders to populate the place. What a scam.
I may have this whole thing wrong. If so, someone please correct me. I'd love to know what is really going on. The phone number of the company simply shunts you to their website.
But it raises an interesting question: who owns your friendships? Is the fact that you are friends with X — particularly if you declare so on one networking site — now public knowledge that can be used by anyone? Is the shape of your life as revealed publicly part of the commonwealth, and in the public domain?
I suspect that your relationships are in the public domain once you make them public on the web, and so reverse engineering your social network from this information is not illegal, although it may not be socially acceptable or a good business practice. It feels more like a chain-letter to me.
I tried calling the Jase Group to ask them about this, but the recorded message told me to contact them via the website.
