Receptional_Andy - 9:29 pm on Apr 22, 2009 (gmt 0)

What's to keep someone with an axe to grind from creating a fake profile, filling it with disparaging information, and getting it to rank on the first page for a name search?

I would class that as "abuse of the system", arieng. IMO, this requires sites that publish personal information to police their members effectively.

More generally, I wouldn't want to be unduly practical and look at Google's record on, for instance, local search to determine how safe and reliable the data is. But I believe it's a wider problem than whether any individual company is reprocessing publicly available data.

How do you know someone on the internet is who they say they are? Basically, you don't. But you haven't had any evidence-based confirmation that most of the people you meet day-to-day are who they say they are, either. We all rely on other things than search engines for that ;)