Comments on: Spokeo? More like Spooky-o; bad practice taken to the extreme.

By: Justin Bieber

Justin Bieber — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 20:37:20 +0000

justin bieber was here…

By: moxley

moxley — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 02:35:33 +0000

Oneother thing that people should know about Spokeo is that while it purports to be something like “plaxo” (or any of these other “keep track of your friends” sites – it;s real purpose is as an information broker that sells “credit estimates.” to anyone, supposedly HR and LE as well.

By: Jim

Jim — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:42:17 +0000

i have been at this for hours all day long,so i am extremely exhausted,but again i will take the time to write regarding spokeo inc..well first of all i wanted to see if i could find my self online lol,and used my personal email address when i did the search i could not believ my old picture 5-6 years ago was there,yeah a site i used to go,so anyways I thought this was interesting,so i signed up for 1 year and was able to check every email i ever used,and yeah i found so much stuff about me,that i forgot about,lol come on we all forget some times.so anyways continue to my story..I ended up finding when i bought things online,yep you guessed it dates and time,years ago,spooky,um yeah,well for me i wanted to contact the old sites i used to belong to,and get my picture of there site,so i contacted one company and they said you will receive an email address at… but never received it..so anyways due to computer issues,i accidently got logged out,and once i went to log back in.I was unable to,and i thought mm maybe i forgot my password,and so i clicked forgot my pass word and entered my e-mail addy that i signed up with,and guess what happened? you guessed it,it said invalid email..so i tryed contacting them,and when i emailed them they repled with some auto response,dont you want youwant to find your friends? and i also called them,and yeah it went right to voice mail after 5million rings,and then messege said voice mail box is full.what a racket,do not due business with this comapny, they are also on many websites that people got scammed by them.well if i helped at least one,well so be it..

By: How to Get Six Pack Fast

How to Get Six Pack Fast — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:01:35 +0000

Not that I’m totally impressed, but this is a lot more than I expected when I found a link on Furl telling that the info here is awesome. Thanks.

By: janice

janice — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 23:01:17 +0000

I just got an unsolicited email from Spooky-o. It totally creeped me out.
Listed all my accounts on various services and my login name. It made me hate it and actually take the time to google it and found this thread.

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.

By: concerned

concerned — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 13:08:21 +0000

A bunch of other people agree with your post and comments:

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.

By: seth

seth — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 22:16:38 +0000

Thanks Aral for this post. I’ve received the “courtesy” email as well, saying that someone has Spookeoed me and that I should sign up to learn more. I’ll assume this is Spokeo’s growth strategy. It’s completely off the mark and has the opposite effect of a good viral, Word of Mouth strategy. With WoM, users sign up to a new site because it was recommended by a person of trust. With Spooky, there’s no way in hell I’ll sign up because someone who’s obviously untrustworthy is using it.

By: concerned

concerned — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:12:06 +0000

I found this thread because I just today received a “courtesy” notice from Spokeo telling me people had looked at my profile in Digg and StumbleUpon and suggesting I join Spokeo.
At the end,

“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.

By: Rosie Sherry

Rosie Sherry — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 10:20:47 +0000

Reminds me of the spamming of Quechup – not quite the same, but somewhat similar. A simple google search on ‘quechup’ brings up loads of posts about it.

By: clark slater

clark slater — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 21:16:56 +0000

Yeah that is really awful. I’m not that surprised though, have you guys checked out what the ‘Spokeo’ service offers? Instant unfettered access to a whole pile of data about your friends that they may not be too happy sharing.

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’.