Spokeo.com – Spykeo.com?
Imagine sitting on your computer, uncovering personal photos, videos, and secrets of other people… tempting?
Well, spokeo.com promotes itself by guaranteeing exactly this.
The Web does not only let emerge new words, as it seems it also gives people ideas for new businesses.
Through a comment of one of my former posts (Does Facebook reflect my reputation?) I became aware of a webpage that offers a detailed “research” on your friends, nearly in real time. It provides the possibility to follow your friends on all of their Internet activities. The user of spokeo.com is asked to provide his Email password, which is used by the server to compare the address book of this particular email address. Those addresses again are used to check out the Internet activities of the friends. The friends, however, will never find out that they were spied on – if friends is still the right expression here.
To learn more about spokeo.com watch this.
To be honest, I find this idea quiet mental and I kind of see some ethical problems here.
First of all, why would someone need to spy on his friends? That would show that this person would have lost any real social contact and the ability to communicate. Besides the fact that status updates and photos in several kinds of social media already reveal a lot about someone. But these updates are made conciously and with the purpose to be seen rather than being spied out secretly.
Additional, wouldn’t this undermine the open and democratic character of Web 2.0?
I guess it just shows again: despite the tempting freedom Web 2.0 seems to offer, it has to be taken with caution. Because the less you expose about yourself, the less can be found.
And when someone really wants to know more about you – there is still something called face-to-face communication…
May 12th, 2009 at 8:50 am
Interesting post!I agree with you, although it seems a good idea there are ethical problems around this. Even though almost everybody works with the internet and uses Web 2.0, there is still the feeling that the face-to-face communication is the key for any kind of job you wish to do.
May 12th, 2009 at 11:26 am
The only issue really is that it doesn’t notify people when they are being tracked. It only tracks social media sites, and furthermore not those pages that are set to private, so in effect you can only be tracked on sites that you would be seen openly on anyway.
Its intentions are good: it is just trying to give us a more convenient social media experience as one of the developers said, but there are ethical issues if it is used as a spying or stalking tool.
May 12th, 2009 at 11:28 am
I agree that Web 2.0 has to be taken with caution. To my mind Spokeo.com is only one example of spying other people out. What about the search engines? An example from the business environment: According to Kevin Donline, Star Tribune Minneapolis, “seventy-seven percent of recruiters report using search engines to find background data on candidates. Of that number, 35 percent eliminated a candidate because of what they found online.” (blog source: Brian Solis “The Socialization of Your Personal Brand – Part 1).
In a nutshell, there are several ways to get information about other people easily without them knowing it.