Perhaps a people directory doesn’t seem terribly valuable, but if you can’t imagine how to make money from knowing everyone’s identity and trust networks, then you aren’t being very imaginative. Spam and fraud are two of the biggest problems on the internet, and they are very difficult to stop because it’s so easy to create new identities, and we have no good way of differentiating between real identities and fake ones. Even in “real” life, people are able to skip town-to-town, defrauding people again and again because to the people in the new town, they have a new and unknown identity.
