If you stopped by someone’s Facebook profile - even someone you didn’t know - and saw a bunch of off-the-wall, tasteless comments, you probably wouldn’t think much about it, right? That’s one of the strange things people do on social networks.

But when you factor Spock into the equation, that might not be the case anymore.

Wired is running a story that portrays Spock - the “people search engine” - as a haphazard, reckless tagger that’s adds anything it finds to people’s profiles. To support the assertion, the article talks about several high school students who had nasty comments left on their Facebook profiles turned into tags on their Spock profiles by the Spock crawler. In addition, the piece goes on to talk about a blogger who covered a story about pedophilia getting tagged as a pedophile on the site.

In its defense, Spock says that it is doing the exact same thing that other search engines do. There’s nothing different about what Spock does and what, say, Google does.

Ahhh… but there is.

Google may associate names with pages - if those names appear on the same page as the information being searched for. If, for example, I have a MySpace page and you search for my name, it’s likely that my MySpace profile will show up. If you were to go and look at that page you’d see all of the stuff there in it’s proper context.

But if Spock came along and extracted words from the profile - and tagged my name on Spock with those words - they are completely without their context. Such was the case with the above-mentioned blogger who found himself tagged with the word “pedophile” - simply because he wrote extensively about a news story that dealt with the topic.

Sure… Spock’s crawler might have “meant” ‘wrote about pedophile’… or ‘covered pedophile story’… but that’s what it tagged this guy with. It simply tagged him “pedophile”.

If you stop and think about it, there are a lot of potentially damaging things on just about all of us out there - if taken out of context. Spock could come here and see my recent posts on content theft and tag my profile with “content theft” - which wouldn’t look good on a blogger’s profile. It could go to any of your sites or blogs or social networks and pull out a bunch of words that, in their proper context, don’t have anything to do with you.

Now hold on. There’s no need to panic and start deleting yourself off the web.

I really like Spock. As I said on launch day, I hope people realize the potential of the site. But do I think it needs to tweak a few things? Most certainly! If someone has claimed their profile and proven their identity, they should be able to delete anything that the Spock crawler has automatically added. There’s just too much opportunity for mistakes or gaming to make it difficult to remove auto-tagged words.

Perhaps they could treat auto-added tags and human-added tags different. The current voting system could be used on all human-added tags. Computer added tags, on the other hand, could be deleted by owner of the profile (assuming it hadn’t already received some arbitrary number of YES votes from users).

What do you think? Is the auto-tagging feature going too far? Should more control be put into user’s hands? Would your opinion change if you were the one tagged as a pedophile?