The website is called Spokeo and their aim is to let you keep track of what (/everything) that your friends are up to on a bunch of different social networking sites, including: last.fm, Amazon, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Facebook, etc. According to Phil Bradley, who tried it out, the system is able to link the profiles of your friends on different sites, even if they use different login names on each site.
What kind of information can you see? Well, anything that's public and anything else you have access to according to the website:
"All users can track information that is publicly available. Only users who have accesss to private content on a third party site can track that private content in Spokeo."The thing is, there is quite a lot of publicly available data about pretty much everybody on the net. A service like this that aggregates the data and make it easier to find and search, means that the inherent anonymity that comes with there being so much data on the net and that data being distributed over so many websites doesn't apply any longer. Data about you can now be integrated, stored and archived. So what you did a number of years ago on some obscure website, may well come back to find (/haunt) you in the future.
Sound fanciful? Imagine for example that you are applying for a job and the prospective employer has a look at your profile on LinkedIn and then links to your Digg profile only to discover that you particularly like stories about some ultra-liberal political candidate ... or that you're into guns ... or maybe you've shown a passing interest in a certain religious sect. - All this information wouldn't be hard to find, but it's probably not the stuff you want on your CV!
Also, it looks like Spokeo isn't the only "social content aggregator" and that these sites are becoming quite common, according to this post on Techcrunch.
1 comment:
Mark - just started reading the blog. Privacy is becoming more of an issue for me - maybe I should start doing research on it. What bugs me is the lack of discussion about in our our community. In fact, some researchers I know boast of being able to link user identities across different sites (often without users being aware of it). If insurance companies, employers gain access to such tools, imagine what will happen. And researchers never stop to ask whether this is right. I think privacy is the atom bomb of CS, yet unlike physicists, computer scientists are not discussing ethical questions around it.
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