Spokeo: I’m Almost Certain They Meant Spooky-o
by
on January 09, 2008,
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.
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Susanna
Svetlana Gladkova
Irel Johnson 
65bus 
That IS creepy. does it even pull photos in Flickr that have been carefully tagged as “private” or for “friends” and “family” only?
It does not pull any private information, so you can’t see private Flickr photos. People already check out their friends, or random girls they’ve met from parties, on Facebook, MySpace, or any other social network. As a result, Spokeo is nothing new in that regard.
New technologies like Spokeo are often disruptive. When search engine first came out, people were very concerned that their public webpages can be found by some random people. However, that does not stop these new technologies changing the way we browse the Web.
Leslie, no, the only things it pulled in were things that were public. Anything that you keep hidden from public view stays hidden. I think, if anything, it really reminds you to be aware of your audience. Take a second look at your Flickr stream and see if you’d want business associates viewing family photos that are public, etc.
What Harrison said is true. I think that the Web moves in fits and starts, with play going back and forth between privacy concerns and being “out there” for public consumption. Nothing that Spokeo does is an invasion of privacy, because everything that’s being viewed is already out there. It’s just a matter of making it a LOT easier to find.
I think Harrison is right… It’s all out there..
It’s just like googling yourself to see what comes up, you should probably proactively use something like this to see what people are going to see about you. Sure, it’s a bit creepy, but if you didn’t want everyone to know you do lime jello shooters and what you do AFTER you do lime jello shooters, don’t put the pictures up.
What will be fun is when these services hook into public records like arrest records and county clerk records, so you can see that your date for next week drove drunk twice last year and was arrested for lewd acts in a parking garage at 2AM, and prepare accordingly.
That’s good, then, Cyndy. It only is a concern if it somehow grabbed your private data, but if it doesn’t, you can’t really complain about it grabbing data you put out there yourself.
Spokeo (or anyone else in that matter) cannot grab your private data if you don’t give it passwords.
I think it has more to do with being uncomfortable with other people’s level of discretion. It’s like having a neighbor who doesn’t close his blinds while he gets into the shower and you get to know a little too much about him.
As such, maybe Spokeo should have some settings about how deep to dig into your contact’s information, and maybe it should let you categorize people by your level of connectedness to them so that it pulls the more mundane information about associates (emails, twitter, etc) but only gets into more personal information (youtube, picasa, etc) if they are a friend (or someone you want to stalk).
Or they could just re-name it Stalkeo…
Grendel, I think I would have felt much more comfortable with a hierarchy like you describe; then again, if Google let us do that in the first place, I wouldn’t also have been so upset about the Google Reader mess.
Great write-up… I won’t give you any crap for stealing my title from my own post in December (http://tropophilia.com/2007/12/14/spokeo-or-spooky-o/).
I’m sure it was a coincidence… how can you help but think of “spooky” after learning about the service?!
Good looking blog, I look forward to reading more.
Jarred
http://tropophilia.com
Great article…