| A startlingly relevant point is raised in Robert Barr's 1906 story The
Absent-Minded Coterie; imagine the power a present-day commercial interest could
wield if it had access to frivolous online personality tests. How much a
scam company would pay for the email addresses of ten thousand people who had
answered "Yes" to the question "Do you consider yourself particularly
gullible?". Or, for that matter, how interested the thought police might
be in people who'd answered yes to (as part of a zanily
innocuous "Which Volkswagen Beetle Are You?" test)
"Are you sympathetic to terrorism?".
It's the "invisible data shadow" thing. I wonder how much The Spark
think they know about me, and who might enjoy the information if they sold
out or got haxx0red. With online tests being so virulent, setting up fake
ones for black-ops marketing seems a very obvious thing to do. It's like
the thing of the husband mocking up a win-some-money Cosmopolitan
questionnaire for his wife, to be posted to a PO box he'd reserved, with
one of the many questions being "Are you having an affair?"
Hmm.
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