Comment Re:Good intentions pave the road to a stalking cha (Score 1) 459
The idea that doesn't "rob a woman of her free will" is based on the idea that we have free will when it comes to who we trust. We've all got healthy baseline distrust toward strangers. It takes a bit of a sociopath be good at manipulating people into building trust quickly. Fortunately, there really aren't that many people who can do it, because we're *all* vulnerable to those folks out there who have a knack for making us into love them. Free will is bullshit. We're social animals and we operate by a fairly standard playbook. We're not expecting people to enter into our lives with a complete portrait of who we are, ripe for exploitation. It changes the rules of interaction that have governed our behavior since sometime around when cities arose. It's basically a tool that turns everyone into a potential sociopath and makes a lot more people into potential victims.
"Oh hey, you just got out of the Peace Corps? I was with them in Kenya last year. Did you know so and so? Oh, you're turning 21 tonight? Let me buy you another drink or two."
My "is this thing creepy?" line is somewhere around "would I stop being friends with anyone who used this?" In this case, the answer to that is definitely "yes".
As for people deserving this because they put the info out there or the company that produced it having any kind of moral standing because they didn't break the law? Bullshit. This is not how people intended for their information to be used. Few people have any clue that this sort of thing could exist. Just because privacy concerns are part of the nerd consciousness, does not mean that the hundreds of millions of people using social networking are on the same page. Whether or not this is legal, creating and using it is gross.