Spokeo... or spookeo, more like
Friday, March 14, 2008

New service, friend info aggregator, Spokeo. Not really heard too much about it. Then this email arrives:



Pretty creepy. Dodgier still is the registration page, which rather than being a usual signer-upper takes you directly to the "share your email login/password with us!" thing, like so:


Ick, yuck and bleugh! Seriously, they have to be kidding.

Labels: aggregation, identity, privacy, spokeo, uncanny

2 Comments:

 xavierv said...

That's cruel!
Spokeo's founder

9:37 PM  

 Guy P said...

Maybe. But you have to look at that first email, which could be presented so much better - as it is, it just makes you feel *watched* in a vaguely ominous fashion.

Conversely, people put loads of effort into trying to actually aggregate their own activity online. Think about how difficult it is to have your new Flickr photos appear in your Facebook news feed (because Facebook really wants you to use their photos tool instead.) Or take the increasing popularity of tumblelogs that automatically combine your del.icio.us links, photos, blog posts, and more.

So, there's clearly a market for this sort of thing. It's actually pretty cool that Spokeo can automatically find and combine all this stuff. But it's done in a clunky way that doesn't really sell what's on offer to the tracker or the trackee.

And as for my final point, dude, I don't even give my girlfriend my email password, let alone random web services.

11:12 PM  

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