Stupid is as Stupid does or, my Dock.io gaffe

So last night while exploring a service called Dock.io, I made a pretty big blunder. I was importing my Google contacts (first mistake) and unintentionally invited all of my Gmail contacts to the service (second very big mistake)—definitely not good. Beyond embarrassing—this was a blockchain identity management service after all—doing something like this shakes people’s trust. No one wants to be spammed, and we designed Reclaim Hosting around the very idea of no up-sell and no BS, so this gaffe is doubly excruciating for me. But, I did it, and it’s my bad and I have to own that and apologize to folks who got a spammy email from me yesterday.

via GIPHY

I cannot vouch for dock.io given it is a new service and I have only become to explore it myself, what’s more I’m by no means sold on blockchain as a solution to anything. But I was interested in how they’re allowing you to use their service to update your personal information across your various distributed accounts. It jives with the idea of the Personal API that we have returned to with BYU, and I wanted to get a sense of their interface and how they are doing this. What  this does remind me of, and this is something I am going to work to divest myself of a bit, is how easy it is to pull all of my Google data into another service to send spammy emails. There are many reasons why this is a huge red flag, and should have know better. Now I have some more self-flagellation to attend to..

via GIPHY

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7 Responses to Stupid is as Stupid does or, my Dock.io gaffe

  1. Pat says:

    I signed up thinking there’d be something cool at the end and I was there, going sheesh, this is dull, why did Jim invite me here.

    I’m not fussed about data, but sheesh, give me something cool

    My end review, felt a bit like gravatar premium

    • Reverend says:

      I think the idea is you connect your personal info to all the various services/apps you have online, and this becomes the single place you change all your personal info. Not very sexy, for sure, but an interesting concept in terms of maintaining and controlling your personal info —hence making this even gaffe even more ridiculous. Thanks for being cool about it.

      • Pat says:

        Yeah, gravatar sort of it does it for avatars, but with no block chain.

        You’re fine 🙂 It’s always handy to see a new site, regardless of how you get there.

        What could be fun is to use this service to just generate noise. Use APIs to generate so much crap data that your data becomes worthless

  2. Brian says:

    When I got the email, I thought it was announcing Docker capabilities with Reclaim, which would have been much more exciting!

    No worries, Jim 🙂

  3. Alan Levine says:

    NOBOBDY self flagellates like the Bava, NOBODY.

    The thing is, knowing your presence and personality online was enough to make me hesitate on getting the email so instead I looked for a mocking gif. There is a lesson there.

    A few clicks back when I had an account in linked in I did something similar as the login screen looked similar to the one where you authenticate so send invites to all your contacts. While embarrassed to have spammed so many I got a heap of replies from folks I’d not heard of in awhile.

    The Bava gets a Get Out of Spam Jail card

  4. Tom says:

    I just thought it was a very involved inside joke. Blockchain is what convinced me.

  5. John says:

    Hi Jim,
    I made the same mistake. At least on mobile I didn’t notice that I was clicking spam everyone. At least I don’t really use gmail so only had abou 70 contacts.

    No matter I’ll still do what Jim Groom tells me on the Internet;-)

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