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I find this startup rather disturbing...

spokeo.com

21–30 of 74 posts

Re: I find this startup rather disturbing...

#21
post #7

No more disturbing than Google really. Today's reality is that if you put information on the internet that can be tied to your name, email, address, phone number, etc, then that information can be found and used for or against you. Improvements in search will make finding this information easier and easier.

and crucially, in a way that is currently of little but growing significance, such information will never go away or shrink .

yes. this is the point - all this fuss will look quaint within months.

Re: I find this startup rather disturbing...

#24
post #20

Isn't this similar to Spock? (www.spock.com) For those who never visited Spock, you entered an email address and it tracked you all over the web. Now it looks like Spock requires logging in to work.

Yeah. And Spokeo is old, old news. Really, it's a matter of what you make available. I can't imagine "stalking" somebody ever really being a good use of time. What bad things are there to find? Drunken pictures? And that's on Facebook, behind a wall.

It's always fun finding 10-year-old, embarrassing news articles or pictures of someone. :) Also, if you're one of the many people who use MySpace instead of Facebook, those drunken pictures aren't behind a wall.

Re: I find this startup rather disturbing...

#26
post #12

Finding all the places you've used your e-mail address that you forgot about: $15 Deleting your profiles from these places: Priceless

Try deleting your Facebook profile my friend, just try.

Send a message to all your friends and Facebook will do it for you.

Re: I find this startup rather disturbing...

#27

How are they getting access to facebook profiles???

Quite. They have me tied by email address to Facebook and I'm 200% certain that my email address there is not "publicly-available information".

Facebook permitting this app to operate will give it serious legal trouble in the EU.

Re: I find this startup rather disturbing...

#28
post #2

I find it rather inevitable. Seems like a killer business model, and it's probably 500 lines of PHP (or whatever). Pretty much just coin-operated at this point, nice steady revenue stream, wish I had thought of it.

Probably more than 500 lines. Doing information extraction on all those different sites probably involves quite a few scripts and doing search on the scale and at the speed they're doing undoubtedly involves backend services too.

When they launched, Spokeo had a really nice Flash client too for aggregating RSS news about the people you're following.

Re: I find this startup rather disturbing...

#29
post #22

I think the most interesting thing about them is that they switched from free to pay, overnight, without warning. Have many other software service startups done that?

When you're that tiny, does anyone notice or care? You can grandfather your favorite users into free accounts and, worse case, you piss off all 10 of your users.

Re: I find this startup rather disturbing...

#30
With tools like this I'll probably remain unemployable indefinitely as anyone with a subscription will find my quaint short stories. Written at a time of youthful tribulation they read like PKD with a sadistic streak.

Or I could just get a new email, but then I'd have no audience and possibly miss out on some interesting conversation.

'So, the main character gags on a dildo laced with LSD?'

'Yes, sir, it's suppose to symbolize the rape and indoctrination of the indigenous people of the amazon'

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