Dec 22 2007
Stalker alert
You too can stalk all of your contacts’ online movements through a new service called Spokeo. I found out about this on Guy Kawasaki’s blog and he explains how it works:
Spokeo
finds information about your friends—long-lost or not—and then tracks their online activities as they make updates. These friends don’t have to “invite” you, approve your friend “request,” or be a member of Spokeo. Spokeo is able to, for example, monitor their Facebook notes and shares, YouTube videos, Amazon wishlists, Flickr and PhotoBucket photos, Pandora favorites, MySpace updates, Twitter tweets, personal websites, and blogs.
You have to try it for yourself to find out how freaky this is. You log in to the site by providing you Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail login details and Spokeo scans your address book, and displays all the online activity from your contacts. This is the list of services that Spokeo can monitor:
- Amazon
- Bebo
- Blogger
- Buzznet
- dailymotion
- deviantART
- Digg
- Facebook Notes & Shares
- Flickr
- Fotolog
- Friendster
- Hi5
- imeem
- Last.fm
- LiveJournal
- MySpace
- Netlog
- Pandora
- PhotoBucket
- Picasa
- PictureTrail
- Slide
- Stumbleupon
- Veoh
- Vox
- WebShots
- Windows Live Spaces
- Xanga
- Yahoo! Videos
- Yelp
- YouTube
So even contacts who you may have just emailed once or twice, appear in your list and you can see everything they have been up to online. Including products they have reviewed or commented on through Amazon, playlists created on Pandora, Bebo posts, Flickr photos.
It’s really bizarre and feels a bit seedy – almost like you’re spying on your contacts without their knowledge. Of course, everything you do online is in the public domain so there’s nothing dodgy going on (I don’t think…)
UPDATE: There are two interesting pages on the Spokeo blog which discuss privacy issues and you should read them both: Your Privacy, and, My Content Privacy.