In this morning’s reading I came across a new search engine called IRSeeK.com which has built a searchable index off spying listening to chats, most likely employing bots to do the dirty work.

In the IRSeeK About Us tab I became curious about this passage (emphasis mine):

By constantly archiving thousands of active, highly-focused, public chat-rooms in a wide variety of topics (e.g. Linux, soccer, Christianity, poker, business and others) then indexing, processing and publishing the content on the web using advanced Web 2.0 technologies while maintaining the privacy of the users, we are creating a knowledge base different from any other.

A couple issues here. One, they are “creating” a knowledge base? No, they are becoming the peeping tom’s of IRC channels without the permission of the people chatting. Two, how are they maintaining the privacy of the users when their entire conversations are being logged? Try searching for one or more handles you’ve used in IRC. Are you finding messages you’ve made in various IRC channels? I found messages I hadn’t even made in IRC, but on Twitter that was picked up by an IRC bot somewhere.

Strangely enough, the IRC server we’ve been running for over five years didn’t yield any hits. It appears our server isn’t on the IRSeeK server list. In the spirit of being open it would be nice to see a complete server export list of the IRC servers IRSeeK is mining.

Good idea, bad idea?
Mining public IRC channels for information and making it searchable isn’t an altogether bad idea, there is a goldmine of information being shared in IRC, but the execution here by IRSeeK is a bit questionable. Do their bots identify themselves as spies? Let’s put this in the context of a respectful search engine spider. Good bots identify themselves like Googlebot and give you the ability to refuse them access. Is IRSeeK following these same principles?

What IRSeeK is doing might be entirely legal, so don’t misconstrue my comments. Just because you can on th web doesn’t mean you should.

My problem with IRSeeK is one of manners. Taking without permission on the web is using bad netiquette. It’s like screenscraping or hotlinking without permission. There is a lot of great information on IRC and that’s what there is to love about IRC but there are also some semi-private conversations that people in niche groups have, yes, even out in the open “public” channels.

As a channel op and IRC server administrator based on experience I wouldn’t feel comfortable logging every word in the public channels and making it searchable without notifying the people in the channels the second they joined that this was happening. Why not? I can think of a couple cases where we’ve posted the public IRC channel logs of the live radio show we do on Fridays and people have come back to me and commented about something they said in the channel being published. People assume, either rightly or wrongly, that what goes on in IRC stays in IRC unless it’s made very clear otherwise. IRC etiquette.

I would be interested in hearing a reply from somebody in the IRSeeK team as to how they are addressing these sensitive issues as well as how they currently are disclosing their bot activity. If they aren’t, then do they plan to do so in the future? If they don’t feel compelled to disclose their intentions, then expect IRC server administrators to be up in arms and this is certainly not an organization or site I’d recommend to anybody. Their “idea” for making select IRC servers chat logs isn’t original, it’s just something few have had the stones to do because of obvious privacy implications.

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