If you’re of a paranoid disposition, or maybe even just mildly suspicious of Big Brother tactics, then the news that Spock intends to build a profile of 6 billion earthlings will have set your antennas twitching. No, not the supremely logical Vulcan first officer / ambassador from the 23rd century but a new search engine of the 21st.

Spock is intended to do for people-searching what Google does for general search. Their intention is to trawl the social sites such as Myspace, Facebook, etc. to build up detailed information on people all over the world. CIA eat your heart out! For those of us old enough to remember when privacy and the ability to walk down the street without being photographed by a battery of CCTV cameras was something we took for granted and made us different from the eastern block with their KGB and Stasi, this has worrying overtones. Even if you don’t keep your email online with the likes of Gmail, or your photos on Flickr, or your bookmarks on Del.icio.us you’ve probably still joined enough discussion groups, or posted on usenet, or commented on blogs for a pretty big dossier to be put together by anyone, be they press reporter or politician, looking for an easy story or scapegoat.

Made a left-wing political comment in your teens? A non-pc comment during drunken online banter? Joined a swingers group? It’s all potentially retrievable, and free to be twisted by anyone with an axe to grind. Of course it could be argued that much of this is retrievable already, but such a dedicated search system is bound to take on new and potentially more invasive methods in order to differentiate it from the competition. Will the social media sites be able to opt out of this process if their members demand it? Will the Spock spider pay attention to robots.txt?

So how happy would you be with total availability of all your online activities. Expect a rise in popularity of anonymous proxy surfing facilities and a renewed use of PGP to encrypt emails. Me, I’ll be polishing up my firewalls and being very careful with the trails I leave.