i got a very strange email today. it was from a site called "share your experiences." the site can be found either at
http://shyex.org or
http://shareyourexperiences.com (although the email's domain was share-your-experiences.org)
anyway, the email said that someone had posted to their site wanting to share an experience about me. i checked around on the net, but couldn't find much about the site. so, eventually, i went to the source. i figure i've got decent enough security that i could risk visiting the site.
it claims to be a place where people can anonymously share experiences they've had with individuals and businesses. basically, when you join their site (it's apparently free, but i didn't look into the details there), you can post about people or groups saying that you have information about them or want information about them or something like that. then, others searching for the same person or group can get in touch with you via their anonymous email server.
i searched for myself and found that someone who claimed to know me "very well" had information he or she wished to share with others about an experience with me sometime in the past year. now, given that this was posted to an anonymous site, it's reasonable to assume that the information is not positive in nature. of course, there's also the fact that there are relatively few people who can truthfully claim to know me "very well." i'd say i know most of them well enough to doubt that they'd go posting to a site like this. so, likely, the information being offered is not only negative, but also less than completely factual.
the site offered me the option to anonymously contact the poster. their FAQ says that you can use the system to pretend to be someone else, and thus find out what's being said about you. they do not, however, recommend doing so. even though the FAQ specifically mentions the suggestion and the search page has more than one link that specifically says you can do that.
there was another link on the page (and in the original email) which would reportedly allow me to request that i no longer receive emails from the site.
thinking things through, i decided to search for a few random people i know, to see if anyone had posted anything about them. in doing so, i discovered something very interesting. the site has one of the worst search setups imaginable. you can search any of 3 different ways, and each way is independent of the other. that is, you can search for a person by name, but that won't turn up any hits if the posting was made under the person's email address. you can search by email address, but that won't turn anything up if the posting was made by name. nor will it turn anything up if you search for the same person under another email address.
in all likelihood, then, if someone actually did post about me, the only people who know about it are the poster, me, and whomever either of us decides to tell. anyone else would only be able to stumble on that post pretty much by pure chance. now, if the poster went around telling people, it would kind of defeat the purpose of posting anonymously.
as far as i can tell, then, the site is one of three things:
1. an oddly complex way to find out if a given email address really goes to a person, and thus can be spammed
2. a surprisingly ineffective way to anonymously slander
* whomever you choose
3. a way to make people feel paranoid
i don't like any of the three options. i mean that both in the sense that i find them highly distasteful and in the sense that none of them really makes much sense.
so, i'm wondering if anyone here knows anything about all this. have you heard of the site? do you know what it's all about?
Paul
* well, technically it would be libel, but slander is the far more commonly used and understood term.
