|
Privacy issue ignited by newfound Web site |
|
|
|
Tuesday, 29 January 2008 |
Remember when Facebook surprised everyone with the addition of the mini-feed?
Me, too.
What I remember most about the feature, however, was not the fact that I was instantly aware of who wrote on someone else’s wall, but the warnings that immediately followed.
I
kept on hearing it over and over again. “Watch what you post. This is
just making it all the easier for professors or future employers to see
what you’re up to.”
Finally I grew tired of the constant advice, and everyone’s words seemed to go in one ear and out the other.
This past week, though, I became aware of something that made me stop and heed every privacy warning I had ever heard.
There is now something out there that resembles a mini-feed on steroids and it is called Spokeo.
Spokeo.com is a Web site that allows you to register with your e-mail address.
Once you have done that, it searches through your address book and
makes a list of “friends” - and you can immediately see what your
contacts have been doing online.
The Web site is able to display information that people put on many
different popular social networks, such as LiveJournal, Flickr,
MySpace, YouTube, and, of course, it shows anything that appears on
Facebook’s mini-feed.
If you happen to look up anyone that has an Amazon account, it can see their wish lists.
The same goes for Pandora, a radio station online that users can
personalize to listen to their favorite music - all playlist
information is fair game as well.
Even if you don’t have an online address book, you can simply enter in
a friend’s e-mail address into the site and it looks up their
information, usually under five seconds.
Someone might be able to achieve similar results from typing someone’s
name into Google and looking up information there, but there would be
thousands of results to look through, and this site promises to have
results quickly.
The home page states it best: “Spokeo finds your friends’ blogs and photos that you never knew about, guaranteed.”
Now, I don’t know if the creators of Spokeo had any intention to make
such an ideal stalking tool, but what’s scary about this site is that
when you enter in a friend’s e-mail address to track them, they have no
idea.
When I entered my own e-mail address into Spokeo for it to scan, it
pulled up a list that included my relationship status, age, and
hometown - it had basically read everything I had written on my
Facebook profile.
With the permission of a few friends, I also entered their addresses
into the Web site to see what I would come up with. It probably took
five minutes total for me to bring up a list that gave me anything from
their picture to their Facebook notes to the photos they had just
uploaded.
I was curious to see whether or not someone’s privacy settings on a
networking site would hinder Spokeo’s results, but even when I used
someone’s e-mail address who had a lot of their information set to
private, the site was still able to bring up at least the photos that
the user had posted.
If this doesn’t make you uneasy about online security, I don’t know what will.
I’ve had conversations with many people who felt similar to how I used
to--they had no fears of displaying personal information online, and
posted numerous photos of their drunken weekends without a second
thought.
Luckily, finding out about Spokeo changed my mind before anything damaged me or my reputation.
I know I will be much more careful in the future to watch what I put
online, whether it is pictures or even something as simple as my
interests.
I plan to take those stories about employers denying jobs to people
after their Facebook or Myspace profiles were searched a lot more
seriously and I encourage you to do the same.
It is much easier to watch what you contribute to social networking
sites now than have to explain at a job interview why your
professionalism disappeared for the span of a weekend.
Trackback(0)
 |
TrackBack URI for this entry
Show/Hide comments