Spokeo.com was brought to the attention of Privacycom by one of our readers. It is a website which crawls all RSS feeds, social networking sites and search engines for user information in which you specify in a search and provides all of this information in one, simple to read, location.

Spokeo, created in 2006, was used as a small tool by a student of Stanford^[1] to encapsulate all the updates of his friends activity into one place to save him from checking each and every social networking website to see what his friends have been up to. This idea sounds great until you actually think about the potential of this service.

There are positive aspects about Spokeo; such as the centralisation of all your buddies' information and the ease of use. Also, those accounts with privacy settings in place actually direct you to a login page in which you have to be registered to the particular social network and have the person on your friends list. This was reassuring to a degree.

The website started as a basic 'test' to see how it would run and introduced the visitor to the service by an opening line which stated, "Do you know how many of your friends blog on MySpace or upload photos to Flickr? We don't think you do."^[2] Maybe your friend didn't want you to know about the alternative websites they use in the first place, which might explain why you didn't know about them. This is why they later changed it to "Learn something new about your friends ... Guaranteed". It then goes on to explain how you can "Track" your friends activity and know what they are up to online; great you are learning the first steps of becoming a stalker.

As the website developed more, Spokeo stated in their 'Privacy' section that all the information gathered is already available on the Internet and can be found via a simple search on a popular search engine and that none of the information is taken from private or restricted profiles unless the user already has access to these in the first place. This is great for those people who have configured the privacy settings on the individual social networks in which they are registered to, but not everybody is privacy conscious. However, Spokeo are being proactive about this and are using this as a method of teaching Internet users about privacy (Great plan guys!). A reassuring quote from an email I received from Harrison states that "We've actually built an unique and comprehensive privacy detection system. After you use Spokeo to find out that you got something public that you aren't aware of, you can go back to the original service to make it private, and Spokeo system will detect that change and reflect that within days." The privacy detection system is one of the very first, if not the only privacy detection in the world.

One major problem that had arisen with this service in first development is that the person you are tracking does not know that you are tracking them nor what information you are actually tracking. Why is this a problem? Well, a lot of children use social networking websites and so do a lot of sexual predators and school friends which means Spokeo makes a great directory of people and information about them. For example, someone could pick up an email address on a gaming forum from someone's profile and add it to a fake account on MySpace or Facebook (people will add you if you show a similar interest) then run it against Spokeo to bring up all activity from that email address across all websites integrated into the service and a full profile of that person will be created. Not only this, but school bullies could track down their victims and harass them online by using the information gathered about them. Harrison's views on this are "In fact, since social networks are about browsing and meeting new friends, it's much easier to stalk others on MySpace and Facebook than on Spokeo. After all, Spokeo's friendships are solely upon your address book. You can't stalk anyone else and meet others on Spokeo." However, although the original intent of use for Spokeo is a good one, there are always people on the Internet which can use the intent badly.

The website used to say that you need to register to be able to use the service, but actually no registration was required as you simply enter your email login such as MSN, Gmail etc. and you can instantly get a list of all your contacts. As always, be wary about entering your login details for your mail email accounts as one person commented on a blog^[3] that in effect, Spokeo will have a database full of valid and working email addresses and logins with nothing in their terms of service which states anything about protection of this information. Again, I put this to Harrison at Spokeo and he said, "As for the password issue, no one is required to give Spokeo passwords. You can sign up using the regular email verification process, and you can upload CSV files if you want. However, as you know, very few people knows what CSV files are, and even fewer wants to go through the export/import procedure. This is why we are offering the address book import functionality, which is a very common feature across all social networks."

To conclude, we have seen great developments of a new aggregator for social network websites and have witness a vast change in website design, policies and privacy protection and would like to congratulate Spokeo on these developments and the efforts that have gone into making a very useful tool for social networking users.

Resources:
[1] http://blog.spokeo.com/?page_id=2
[2] http://www.spokeo.com/#
[3] http://blog.evanweaver.com/articles/2008/03/06/spokeo-spam/