UCLOO - A very scary sourcing product

Posted by Jim Stroud

November 28, 2006

Want to see something really scary? Check out the homepage of Ucloo.

Gee it looks like Google doesn’t it? And in case you have not noticed it, the site is in Chinese. Ucloo is a “people search engine” ala LinkedIn and (coming soon) Spock.com. Check out an english-translation of one of the profiles.

Okay, so you’re not impressed. Let me help you out a bit.

With a few simple strokes (in Chinese), you see on any given profile: Name, Birthday, Contact information, education, work background, pictures, online activity (what you have posted in what online forum and where, websites frequented), all of your email addresses, who you have corresponded with via email, who you have chatted with via instant messenger and (check this out!) it even lists the court records of an individual.

Want to hear more?

Ucloo also offers up (at an affordable price - $0.12 in US Dollars) home addresses, job status, personal records on property, bank credit, and marital status on 90 million Chinese people and counting! Oohhh… Did I mention that all of this information was appropriated and sold without the permission of the the person being profiled? They even had to settle some umm… legal issues about how they gathered their info. And it looks like the Chinese people are not jumping for joy over the product.

Ucloo is a small start up, with less than 10 staff, registered in Seattle. The company CEO is Steve Wu, a US citizen. I wonder how much of his info is on Ucloo? (I don’t know Chinese so I couldn’t investigate - sorry.)

If you can’t get enough of this stuff, here is some more reading for you.

So this brings to mind a question, how much is too much information? And better yet, I wonder what the US-version will look like. (I am assuming that one is on the way.) Your thoughts?

-Jim

You’ll find physician jobs on The Recruiter.com.