For today's edition of the NPR News program "Day to Day," I filed a report on the controversy surrounding Jigsaw Data, an online business contact management site that's something like Wikipedia meets eBay meets a Rolodex. Its founder, Jim Fowler, says he's just providing a way for professionals to reach each other more efficiently. Members pay $25/month to obtain 25 contacts from the site, or agree to put in 25 contacts a month to get 25 others out.
Users maintain the data, but unlike Wikipedia, they don't do it for love here — they do it to score points, so they can download more contacts. Michael Arrington of Techcrunch says it ought to be illegal, and breaks an implied social contract — nobody expects that when they hand someone a business card, this personal data will end up on a searchable, publicly-accessible website. Researcher danah boyd says it's an icky but expected evolution from sites like MySpace, Plaxo, LinkedIn, and Friendster, and says people tend to react negatively to services like this because we want control over how reachable we are, and don't like to think of friends or colleagues as numeric "points" to be cashed in.
Listen to the story here after 12pm PT (in streaming Real and WM), or hear it on your local NPR affiliate. "Xeni Tech" archives here.
