14 DAY TRIAL // Rating is all the latest buzz when it comes to Internet reviewing. You choose a movie or a book, or even a service based on how many stars other people that have already viewed / read / used it have awarded. It's sort of like blending into the crowd and losing your personality when taking other people you don't know for granted. At least that's how I see it.
Philipp Lenssen of Blogoscoped quoted Reza Behforooz, working at Google, as saying in his blog that "I love reputation based systems like eBay and wikipedia. It's a good way to build trust and fight spam. I personally wish there was an easy way for people to have a publicly visible reputation that was influenced by anyone. Imagine a world where people could easily point their cell phone at you and give you a plus or a minus vote. If you let someone merge in, the other driver can give you a small star. If you stop and help someone with a flat tire, you might get lots of stars. If you cut people off or cheat on the carpool lane, you get bad karma. That's similar to PageRank. We all look at reviews for movies, restaurants, books, hotels, etc. And we look at the star rating on youtube, netflix, etc. Why not have it for people?"
I could dish out a few reasons: what about a jealous ex girlfriend that would definitely lower your rating if it was you who decided to break it off? How about a teacher unhappy about your homework, deciding to punish you by removing one of your stars? You only get like 5, so that would be a total bust. Some kid you used to fight with back in junior high and still holds a grudge, your drinking buddy that you bailed on to be with your girlfriend through a rough time, and the examples could go on forever.
This is only a side to the story, the seemingly funny one. The other deals, with incredible privacy violation being made available to all, based on the digitization of your face required for the recognition and, to cut the long story short, I guess everybody's seen at least a couple Science Fiction movies where people used to be recognized just by scanning them. Mind you that was always done by the bad government that wanted to know everything about everyone and keep even the basic human rights under their heel.