This is my #1 vote for cringe-inducing site of the year. what a stupid idea.

All I am going to do is go to each of the services they listed and try to figure out how they got my user name AND email Then I’m going to write a nastygram if appropriate to the service.

http://blog.randulo.com/

Bad viral idea, bad!

I second the wisdom given above, DO NOT EVER do this. Think about all the spam you receive. Much of it is thanks to your friends and contacts whose address books have been compromised by spammers. Unfortunately this is often a result of simple bad practice like sending 100 people including you email CC’ed instead of BCC’ed. SO anyone on the list whose PC is droned has now contributed your email to the spam db.

Web 2.0 companies should not use OPT-OUT mailings ever. It’s lame, obnoxious and went out with old school of spam.

“This is a one-time courtesy notification about your online privacy.
If you wish to opt out of all future emails, click here.”

First of all, I don’t deal with companies that spam regardless of what they do. This is opt out, aka SPAM.

Second, it is indeed spooky, unless they just made it up randomly, as in “you have just won the lottery”, except that they had my username on both sites.

They recommend that if I don’t want to be contacted, I should change my security settings on the sites in question.

Yes the data is technically in the public domain but without hours of dedicated search you would be unlikely to find it. In fact unless you’re into stalking your friends it’s probably not the kind of data you would ever see.

But thanks to Spokeo, one quick (and as Aral notes, thoroughly unsafe) login later, you have access to a ton of info about anyone who has ever gmailed you or chatted with you on GoogleTalk etc. Within 1 minute of checking out their service, I found out several things about people I know, which I have absolutely no doubt they would be uncomfortable with.

In my view the whole Spokeo thing is one of the most unethical abuses of the network I’ve seen in years. I predict they are going to get a snowball effect of negative exposure as the collective penny drops and I hope they call it quits before they wreak too much damage.

Like all personal spidering applications, it’s stinky and it’s just a really bad idea, poorly implemented and with little to no regard for any unintended effects on their ‘users’.

You don’t need to give us any sensitive information in order to use any of Spokeo’s functionalities. That said, users have to understand how to deal with CSV files (which surprisingly, a lot of people still don’t) in order to take full advantage of the Spokeo system. This is why we modeled our design after any other social network out there. Please try signing up on any of the major social networks, and you should see the same screen.