Jigsaw is evil

Jigsaw is a marketplace for contact information, and it is very efficient. It boasts detailed personal contact information for 8 million people, and 25,000 new people are added every day. If you want the name, title, email address, direct phone line and/or address of any executive of any company, there is a very good chance Jigsaw will already have it in its database and will sell it to you. And if you are a sales guy and have no ethical concerns about where you get your contact information, you probably already know all about Jigsaw.

Unlike competitors like Hoovers and InfoUSA, which gather company information by semi-legitimate means such as scouring SEC filings, cold calling companies and asking for information, and reviewing other public documents, Jigsaw simply pays people to upload other people’s contact information. Users are paid $1 for every contact they upload, and some users have uploaded information on tens of thousands of people.  Jigsaw is also self correcting, and incentivizes people to also correct bad contact information.

That’s right, the next time you hand out a business card to someone you may be handing it out to the entire world.

Here’s how it works: Sign up and start downloading contact information. This includes name, title, company, address, email and direct phone line.

Let's see...am I there? Of course, thanks to "Osiris" (a Maven user, with 483 contacts entered):

But wait, it gets much worse.

Anyone can find out if Jigsaw has their contact information via a link on the home page, but amending or trying to delete that information simply puts a flag on the data with the changes noted - but the original information also remains.There appears to be no way to remove your own contact information from Jigsaw once someone has entered it into their database. There is no method that I was able to find on the website to do this (including in the privacy policy), and an email to the company asking about this went unanswered (it's been ten business days now).

Jigsaw has a carefully worded privacy policy to deal with the fact that they are the antithesis of privacy. They say “This privacy policy covers how, when and why we collect, use and share information about our users…This policy does not apply to our collection and use of data about companies and contacts contained in our database system.”

Is Jigsaw legal? Maybe in the U.S., although I’d love to see a class action case brought against them. Is it ethical? Absolutely not. Every Jigsaw employee and investor has dirty hands and they should be ashamed of themselves.

Like Plaxo, Jigsaw makes money while pushing costs to other people. In Plaxo’s case, its spam. In Jigsaw’s case, its making private contact information public. The problem here is that Jigsaw’s actions aren’t easily found out by people getting constant cold calls and emails - it’s very unlikely they’ll know that these people got this contact information at Jigsaw in the first place.

If they wanted to do this right, they’d set up a marketplace where individuals could choose to sell (or give away) their contact information. The owner of the data could set the price, and Jigsaw could take a cut. Would this model work? Perhaps not, but that just proves my point. The only reason Jigsaw does work is because they don’t have to bear the costs that they push to third parties - all of the people who are in their database.

Comments

[W. B. McNamara]

The premise of most networking tools, business, social, or what-have-you, is that you’re providing information about yourself in return for access to the information that others are providing…but you retain control over your own information. Jigsaw perverts that relationship by requiring you to provide information about *other* people in return for access to the system.

I haven't checked in on Jigsaw since late 2006, but there is hope: when I checked my company more than 50% of the "contacts" listed were wrong in one way or another. Wrong like having not worked at the company in more than two years, for example.

So while Jigsaw is a terrible idea that encourages disrespectful treatment of your colleagues and friends, at least it doesn't work very well…

[Bob Aman]

What happens if someone decides to spam the Jigsaw database with invalid data? Between anonymous proxies, botnets, and lots of fake accounts, it wouldn't be too difficult to make it so that the database is completely worthless. May be it already is.

[Otis Gospodnetic]

Couldn't a solid group of enthusiasts start entering invalid data and getting $1/invalid contact from Jigsaw? Work from home, make money, and mess with Jigsaw.

[Chris - Touchstone Gadget]

Posting about Jigsaw everywhere is probably going to give them more business though :)

Reply from Mario Fantoni: "Yes, I know. But ethically-challenged sales professionals already know about jigsaw. I want to try to raise the awareness of the company with others, too, so that maybe, at least, they’ll allow people a way to get their personal contact data out of the jigsaw system."

[Bob Blakley]

Jigsaw has been slashdotted via a story in the San Francisco Chronicle. Check:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/09/05/BUG1EKU7LD1.DTL&hw=jigsaw&sn=001&sc=1000

[Jack]

Well, Jigsaw allows anybody to enter data that is already available through the net. From a viewpoint, this is less subject to ethical objections, since in this case they only gather public information.

How to know how much would be the cases where the information comes from personal business cards?