Actually what scares me is that I log in and find out that Pandora apparently has a public profile for me. WTF? I sign up for Pandora and somehow Rapleaf gets my email from them?
Does Rapleaf scare you?
11–19 of 19 posts
Re: Does Rapleaf scare you?
#12It sort of scares me because I keep reading their name as "Rape leaf" - but aside from that I'm not on Facebook so I'm not all that worried :)
Re: Does Rapleaf scare you?
#13Actually what scares me is that I log in and find out that Pandora apparently has a public profile for me. WTF? I sign up for Pandora and somehow Rapleaf gets my email from them?
Are you sure that's not because Pandora is part of Facebook's instant personalization program (http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/04/27/a-look-at-facebooks...)?
Re: Does Rapleaf scare you?
#14Ugh... I can't seem to find it but someone built a quick and dirty web page that would use Rapleaf's API to lookup email addressess.
EDIT1: I think it's somewhere on Pete Warden's blog (same guy that crawled Facebook).
EDIT2: Here it is.
Re: Does Rapleaf scare you?
#15Rapleaf doesn't scare me -- their data is only what's publicly available on the web. If you don't want RapLeaf to have it, don't post it on the web. I actually know their Chicago account manager and have meet one of the co-founders. They are a stand-up group and take privacy and data integrity quite seriously. My company uses their data to pull additional information on "influencers" we identify doing online research…
Yeah, sometimes your information gets published to the web in unexpected ways. Like the first time I responded via google groups, google snuck my gmail address on the post (without indicating that it would), or how Amazon Web Services published my real name as a Developer Profile because I had to give a real name and credit card to try out S3.
Re: Does Rapleaf scare you?
#16> “If a customer’s email address is attached to three or four social networking sites with 300 friends, the email likely isn’t fake and the retailer can put that person in the ‘good’ pile.” The guy who sold sex.com had an interesting idea in his Mixergy interview about making loans to young adults by having them pledge their email or Facebook as collateral. For example, if the loan wasn't being repaid, the service wo…
This is actually a pretty good idea. Remember the discussion of a payday loan startup a while back?
Mobile phone companies give people very expensive stuff (high-end phones) in exchange for regular payment. This is effectively a loan, given even to people no bank would deal with.
Mobile phone companies can do a lot of damage to your social life (by cutting off the phone); apparently, this is sufficient to keep people paying their monthly fee. Again, this includes people no bank would deal with.
The parallel to Facebook, say, would be obvious. But it's hard to make this work if the borrower can just change his/her password...
Re: Does Rapleaf scare you?
#17Interesting. In my case they seem to latch on to dead accounts or accounts with fake info.
If you're worried about services like Rapleaf, mix fake info into your public profiles. Most sites have no business knowing your birthdate, city of residence let alone your mailing address. Regularly forget your passwords and whimsically start over with new accounts.
Make it hard for automated scripts to harvest your real identity. Be "damaged goods" that can't be easily sold.
Re: Does Rapleaf scare you?
#18> “If a customer’s email address is attached to three or four social networking sites with 300 friends, the email likely isn’t fake and the retailer can put that person in the ‘good’ pile.” The guy who sold sex.com had an interesting idea in his Mixergy interview about making loans to young adults by having them pledge their email or Facebook as collateral. For example, if the loan wasn't being repaid, the service wo…
This is actually a pretty good idea. Remember the discussion of a payday loan startup a while back? Mobile phone companies give people very expensive stuff (high-end phones) in exchange for regular payment. This is effectively a loan, given even to people no bank would deal with. Mobile phone companies can do a lot of damage to your social life (by cutting off the phone); apparently, this is sufficient to keep people…
Changing the email to a loan company owned email would prevent this.
Re: Does Rapleaf scare you?
#19Yes, I opted out as soon as I knew I could.