Spokeo: I’m Almost Certain They Meant Spooky-o

I've heard dribs and drabs of news about Spokeo over the past year, but it took a push from Guy Kawasaki's blog over the holidays to actually get me to log in and check it out.

Spokeo, if you haven't heard about it, is an all-in-one aggregator for all your social networking sites, from Amazon wishlists to YouTube videos. In all, 33 sites are currently supported in Spokeo, allowing you to keep tabs on every site in one place.

Here's what's slightly (okay, a bit more than slightly) creepy about Spokeo, however; you don't have to invite anyone, approve anyone, or really do much of anything. Getting all your contacts set up is as simple as providing your email address and password, and Spokeo will import your contacts and start crawling the sites to find updates.

Here's the kicker: you don't necessarily have to be friends with the people in your contact list in order to see what they are doing on many of the sites. From Twitter tweets to Picasa photo albums (which, quite honestly, I had no idea anyone I knew even USED), whatever people in your address book are doing on the 33 sites, you will have it dumped into your feed.

Judging by the data I received when I imported ONLY my work address, there are a lot of people who have no qualms about having quite a bit of personal information out there. I use Gmail for my work email address simply because it's so portable and I've been too lazy to get my domain set up in Google Apps. Even if I had, the mail system works the same way, storing every email address you send to or receive from as a contact. I'm not entirely sure that people I emailed about a possible project once a year-and-a-half ago would be pleased that I can now follow every time they upload a picture of their toddler.

I've mentioned before that I'm a very private person online, and take great care to not have much of that information out there, so I am coming to Spokeo with that bias. Still, my initial set-up found photo albums from friends I wasn't aware that they had, and I felt very much like an online voyeur. And yet, I couldn't quite bring myself to stop clicking more links.

Spokeo only pulls updates that are publicly available, so any privacy concerns are technically on the side of the users of these services. Still, I don't think most people think of having photos they share with friends and Flickr groups available to anyone they've ever had email contact with. I honestly can't say if I'll continue to use Spokeo, because while the convenience is nice, I feel like I've crept into someone's home to leaf through their family albums.