ZabaSearch: A Good Way To Get Reporters In Trouble

Shh! Don't tell Elinor Mills over at CNet about this, she'll just cause more trouble. ZabaSearch, a search engine geared toward finding personal information on anybody, is soon to offer a blogging feature that will no doubt produce more gossip than a quilting bee. Google+balances+privacy%2C+reach/2100-1032_3-5787483.html?tag=nl">Ms. Mills. And we all know how that San Francisco Chronicle. "What's worse than a Web site that, for free, provides oodles of personal information about you and your family to anyone who wants it? "How about that same site adding a blog feature that allows people -- former classmates, ex-lovers, disgruntled co-workers -- to discuss you online?" asks Lazarus. And that's exactly what it does. After running a search on, let's say Stove Bellmer, for a completely fictitious not-an-executive-of-a-major-corporation person, searchers will see, just below the address and phone number, a link to ZabaBlog. This function, apparently to be launched on September 1st, creates an automatic blog about the person that was queried and allows users to opine, deliver titillating gossip, news, or any other kind of additional information. This can't turn out well. So basically what we have here is a place to look up people's histories as well as a place to check out what everybody's saying about them-kind of like a trashy wiki-celebrity-tabloid. Lazarus rightly notes his uncertainty as to how ZabaSearch will monitor the blogs to protect itself against defamation and libel litigation. Privacy rights advocate, Beth Givens, is also clearly upset. ""It's outrageous," Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, told Lazarus. "For a people-search service to move into the area of what could be unsubstantiated gossip is highly irresponsible." In a train-wreck kind of way, it will be interesting to see how this develops. What do you think? Discuss at