Article in the NewScientist on the bad use of crowdsourcing, more on DARPA's Network Challenge test

This article, 'Innovation: The sinister powers of crowdsourcing' , talks about how the power of a crowd of people via communications on the internet or mobile network can be used for bad things. The article does a good job of highlighting some of the reasons government agencies find the power of people interesting and in a way that could work against peoples basic rights.

The points made in this article about leveraging a service like 'Amazon's Mechanical Turks' or a simple online game, show that it is easy to lure people into contributing to a crowdsource effort without properly evaluating the implication of their actions. Might be a good iPhone app, something that would help people quickly get a 'crowdsourced' opinion on whether to participate in a crowdsource effort....


This is a follow up to some of my earlier interest in the Network Challenge.