What’s Your Score? QDOS Analyzes Your Impact on the WWW

2008 August 30

by Urbain

QDOS beta is a new service that, in its own words, “lets you take control of and manage your digital identity.” You can see what kind of impact you have on the worldwide web by adding in your social profiles (such as Twitter pages, Digg pages, etc.), your home page, your blogs, your websites and more. After you have entered all of this information, the beta software determines your “QDOS” score. I filled in about half of the information and as of August 24, had a score of Q2860. The score automatically updates every week. If you want, you can have QDOS update your score on a daily basis.

Comparing Your Score with Others; My Personal Reservations

I am not sure what kind of practical value this has other than another fun Internet test, but you can compare your score with those of celebrities, politicians, friends or co-workers. The site claims that this will help people “claim their identities” instead of fearing identity theft. I don’t know … I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to place every single website and blog that you own in the profile.

QDOT profile

How you make the comparisons is to view your profile. There’s a drop down menu that allows you to compare your score against celebs, body builders, venture capitalists … you name it. On an overall level, out of the 64,000 (+) people who have obtained QDOS scores, mine placed me in the bottom half of people having an impact online, but at least it was near the top of the fold. I suppose if I took the time to add all websites, blogger blogs and social networking profiles, that would change. For now, I’ve decided to delete a bunch of the information simply because I am very uncomfortable with having every single website, social network and blog logged together on a single page. By deleting everything except this blog that you are reading, my score dropped to Q2590, which puts me in the lower third of all participants.

Apparently other people have concerns about placing their entire basket of eggs on one profile page. In the FAQs, QDOS explains:

Does QDOS jeapordise peoples online identity by making their QDOS public?

No. Nothing QDOS does puts anyone at risk of identity fraud or theft - no new personal information is exposed. In fact we firmly believe that if consumers are more aware that they have something valuable to protect called a digital identity, they are more likely to make themselves harder targets for identity thieves.

We are trying to do in a positive way what thousands of scare stories about ID theft and surveillance society have failed to do. We are trying to get consumers to engage with their digital identities.

If you’re curious about your QDOS score, get it here: QDOS.com I’m very interested in what others think about revealing their Internet information on QDOS. Please comment below.