Rename it “Cardster” and Watch the VCs Come Running….

OK, here’s a new idea: Search for people based on their business cards. I kid you not. CardBrowser is a web-based, paid registration database of…business cards gathered at various high tech conferences (more than 100 a year, they claim).

Now, nowhere on the site can I find exactly *how* they gather those cards, or if the folks represented on those cards are aware they are in a database, but…I’ve called to find out and will report back when I do.

The company behind CardBrowser is marketing the database as a way for companies to find “passive” job seekers – folks who already have good jobs in high tech who might not be actively raising their hands for new jobs. Recruiters can buy a subscription to the site and then contact potential recruits – and, the site boasts,have a pretty good chance of getting a response, as the information on a business card tends to be accurate.

This brings up a rather odd catch 22. Now, if the folks who are in this card database – and the company claims to have more than 17000 names, with some 2000-4000 added each month – *do* know they are being added to this database, then well, they ain’t exactly passive anymore, are they? As an employer, I’d be less than happy to discover some of my key people in this database, and were I the distrustful type, I’d probably get a subscription just to check. If, on the other hand, the folks do *not* know they are in the database, seems to me we’ve got something of a privacy problem on our hands. The company has no privacy policy I could find, and does not address this issue anywhere. Could this be a simple oversight?