Another Nail in the Privacy Coffin

Somehow, even though it’s been around for years, I managed to remain unaware of Spokeo until yesterday.  But lord knows they’ve been aware of me — and you.

If you’re also unfamiliar with the service, it’s basically an aggregator of anything you’ve ever done online.  You join, and then Spokeo scrapes your email contact list and shows you what everyone on your list is doing across every one of their web profiles.  It’s like stalking by accident — as evidenced by the color-coded gossip mongers on their homepage.

Spokeo currently boasts input from 40 different websites, giving anyone who’s ever emailed you before a pretty detailed picture of who you are and what you do — and have done.  Ever.

Check out these pull-quote testimonials about the power of the service, also pulled from their homepage:

Got that?

If it’s hard to read in these screen caps, PC World, ABC News and TechCrunch each laud Spokeo’s ability to “dig up information on friends, foes, ex-boyfriends, ex-girlfriends and everyone in-between — and the best part is they don’t have to know you’re keeping track of them.”

Yay!  Now it’s stalking on purpose!

And while it’s obviously appealing to people who just can’t stop cyberstalking everyone they know, that’s just the gateway to it’s actual usefulness: business and law enforcement (as noted in the nav bar in the first image).  By luring in the nosy next-door neighbors of the world, Spokeo automatically populates its database with information about everyone its users know — which then becomes legitimately useful to the people who can make actual use of that information by marketing to or, potentially, litigating against you.

Reel in the Suckers, and They’ll Drag the Whole World Behind Them

How did I hear about Spokeo?  Oddly, not from any of the blog articles written about it over the years, which (correctly) point out the system’s uncanny resemblance to an uninvited Big Brother whose tentacles reach farther than its users initially realize.  I heard about it when someone who’s emailed me once before evidently signed up for the service.

I know Cristina in passing, but we’re not on a “hey, let’s grab a beer” level of acquaintanceship.  But because I’m in her address book, she now knows everything about me that Spokeo can tell her.

Notice the creative wording in this email, which makes it sound like people are using Spokeo to voluntarily follow me out of convenience, rather than as an automatically triggered response to a pre-set instruction from the service.  That’s a much cuddlier approach than the “Warning: Your privacy is being breached” type of emails they used to send out a few years ago.

Also, notice the other twist in this “opt-in” puzzle: in the fine print of Cristina’s email, it says: “If you wish to opt out of all future emails, click here.”  As though, because Cristina signed up for the service, everyone in her address book must now choose to opt out of also being part of the service by association.  How cosy.

Of course, as most observers have pointed out, there’s nothing Spokeo can find that isn’t already “out there” anyway.  In fact, they’re even doing you a service by showing you all the unused accounts (or incriminating information) you’ve left littered behind you on the information superhighway — and you might want to clean those up.  But the purists will argue that just because I’ve responded to an email from a client or a Craigslist seller, that doesn’t mean those people deserve to know everything they can discover about me with one click.

Too late: the Internet is here.  And it knows you.

Tags: anonymity, common sense, ethics, honesty, privacy, Sociology