Rapleaf began as a competition to eBay's reputation ratings. Rather than being tied to eBay's auctions, though, Rapleaf would track an individual's reputation universally, online and offline. Reputation ratings have been a valuable resource, but proprietary to eBay. The idea of a rating which would apply both to the Web and the real world was well-received — except by eBay, which banned Rapleaf's nascent service last year.

But at its launch, its chances of success were pegged to getting other consumer websites to use its rating system, rather than just relying on user comments and ratings. A year later, it has attracted a few meaningless partners — and evolved into something less reputable than a reputation tracker. Rapleaf has devolved from the lofty category of "reputation tracker" into a "people search" site — a thoroughly sleazy category that includes sites like Spock and PeekYou.

Hoffman further muddied the waters by introducing a couple of subsidiary services to Rapleaf. UpScoop, a product that mines all of your email contacts and tells you what social networks they belong to, launched in January. Rapleaf bills UpScoop as a "fun, free service," but it primarily harvests new emails for Rapleaf to index. It certainly does little to bolster Rapleaf's goal "to make it more profitable to be ethical."

Indeed, some charge that Hoffman is making Rapleaf more profitable by being unethical. His latest service is TrustFuse, which sells Rapleaf demographic data to marketers. When CNET recently ran a story on Rapleaf and TrustFuse, Hoffman killed the TrustFuse website and altered RapLeaf's privacy policy. But TrustFuse, as a service, quietly lives on.

So Rapleaf is not really an online destination where people go to evaluate the reputations of business partners. Rather, it is a honeypot using Rapleaf and UpScoop to lure people in and harvest personal data to be sold through TrustFuse — all thanks to Hoffman's once lofty, now rapidly diminishing reputation in the Internet business.

Blogger John Aravosis learned that he ranked in the top search results for pedophile, presumably, he notes, because he covered the Mark Foley trial. Scary! After hearing this, I prudently checked the Spock profile for Mary Jane Irwin. My adoring fan Dave McClure, who's gone from playing Facebook fanboy to being a Spock advisor, has tagged me as both a "Luddite" and a "Spock lover." Both completely untrue. He's also tagged colleague Megan McCarthy as "naughty" and "likes twins," among other things. Apparently accurate, so score one for McClure and Spock.

As Wired News writer Dan Tynan points out, the truly scary thing is that, unlike Facebook or MySpace, you have very limited control over your Spock profile. Claiming it does little more than alert you to changes. It does nothing to safeguard your online reputation. Users can post disparaging tags to their hearts' content. Your only hope is that enough people will vote the offending tag as inaccurate to warrant its removal, or Spock will favor your request for deletion (as it has done in the Mad Libs and Aravosis cases).

Spock CEO Jaideep Singh's basic excuse is that this is the Web, and that you should get over it. "The best way to ensure that Spock will not index Web documents about you is to remove all documents about you from the Web," he says. At this point, I don't think that's even possible. But the least we can ask is that those documents be interpreted accurately. A better idea? Remove Spock from the Web, until it deploys its robots more responsibly.

Radar Networks, a semantic-Web pioneer, wants to bestow intelligent search and linking upon the Internet. Planning a trip to Vegas? You'll instantly know who in your network lives there, where they work, their favorite casinos and whether they wear boxers or briefs. Radar's client software, masked as a digital life organizer, will be able to ferret out all your engagements and use them to plot out everything from your next doctor's appointment to tomorrow's Happy Hour. Or, one day, in a future version, conspire to kill you if you're not maximizing your life potential.

Search engine Spock is, similarly, just at the beginning of its ultracreepy potential. The newly launched people-finder has already been stirring up concerns over personal privacy. While every tidbit of personal info it gathers was willingly surrendered to various social networks, the information was scattered across multiple sites. Now that it's all in one place, it's easily compiled for various nefarious ends. Standards for metadata, the big kahuna of Web 3.0, just promises to make things easier for Web-scouring sites like Spock.

The problem with Spock and the greater ideal of a semantic Web is the continued need for human input. Intelligent tags for metadata don't magically appear. Humans need to establish the relationships between data points. Even Spock claims to rely on users to ensure personal data is correct. Spock is going to have a hard time keeping tabs of all 6 billion people. How exactly is a semantic Web going to manage a world's worth of data? Wikipedia can barely keep itself straight.

The really scary thing is if they actually manage to do the job. If the Semantic Web becomes real, we're all surely doomed. It's just a matter of time before the computers figure out they don't need us. So thanks a lot, Spock and Radar, for working towards a better, humanity-less tomorrow.

Nick Douglas writes for Valleywag, Prezzish, and Look Shiny. Wanna fight?