
I find this startup rather disturbing... - iamelgringo
http://www.spokeo.com/hr
======
AlexeyMK
The argument against this startup is the same argument that was made when
Facebook introduced the news feed; namely, that there is a difference in terms
of the privacy of merely having publicly available data and aggregating that
very data. The argument has to be, the very aggregation of data is an invasion
of privacy; the added simplicity is an aide to stalking and illegal/immoral in
itself.

This is sort of the 'see-through window' argument - If you live in a sky-
scraper and you have sex in front of a window, and somebody takes a photo, is
that invasion of privacy? The 'information' was technically already out there,
and the photographer merely aggregated it (lets say he also found out who
lived in the apartment through information publicly available) and posted it
online.

Can aggregation in itself be an act of intrusion? I don't know, but its one
hell of an argument to have.

~~~
jamiequint
With Facebook news feed the data is limited by the fact that you have privacy
settings and can limit the information you provide to a certain set of people
which you choose.

~~~
AlexeyMK
Yes, precisely. This is how Facebook moved to address the initial news
feed/mini feed issues.

The current start-up is likely to be under similar constraints; unless they're
everybody's friend, only publicly accessible information should become
available in the first place. And yet it still feels uncomfortable that the
aggregation (basically a social-network google-ing of you) is so easy.

------
begemot
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'

~~~
natch
You do know that it's OK to have more than one email address, I suppose. But
then, remaining unemployable probably has its upside too ;-).

~~~
nihilocrat
Everyone should learn at an early age that they need at least two addresses;
one for personal asshattery (leethaxor@gmail.com) and one for professional or
semiprofessional correspondence (your.name@gmail.com). Only use the
professional one for your professional correspondence (sending resumes) or
signing up for mailing lists / whatever where you are going to be on your best
behavior (an open source project's mailing list). Use leethaxor for whatever
the hell you want.

On a similar note, use 'leethaxor' when posting your personal opinion in a
comment / on a forum... if you make a comment / post in your real name, assume
it will show up on the first page when someone googles your name (this
actually happens a lot).

Preventing the need for your personal data to be removed is the best way of
ensuring your privacy, rather than wishing you had never written that Harry
Potter slash fanfic eight years ago under your real name.

~~~
khafra
Yup, I figured this out around 1995, when getting my first hotmail account.
Keeping your normal online persona psuedonymous means never having to say "I'm
sorry." Of course, it's still sorta easy to leak personally identifying
information, but at least it'll take some more sophisticated data mining to
connect those dots; something like what this one hosted java connection-finder
whose name I can't remember does.

------
dmoney
Finding all the places you've used your e-mail address that you forgot about:
$15

Deleting your profiles from these places: Priceless

~~~
woodsier
Try deleting your Facebook profile my friend, just try.

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

~~~
alex_c
That made me laugh, but I don't think Facebook ever deletes anything. Ever.
They just "disable" stuff.

~~~
gaius
No-one ever deletes things. When you "delete" your account, for example, they
aren't going to invalidate their last set of backups. They aren't also going
to anonymize all the comments/messages you sent that now reside in other
people's profiles. Any information you give to any social networking site
belongs only partially to you, partially to them, and partially to the members
of your network with whom you have interacted.

------
mojombo
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.

~~~
jodrellblank
and crucially, in a way that is currently of little but growing significance,
such information _will never go away or shrink_.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
In a way it can shrink. It can shrink by getting diluted or poisoned with crap
data.

------
AlexeyMK
It tracks you by your email. Well, that was simple.

Get a professional vs personal email, if you don't have both already, and
manage them both using Gmail ([http://look.fo/how-to-manage-multiple-email-
accounts-from-gm...](http://look.fo/how-to-manage-multiple-email-accounts-
from-gmail)).

Potentially, buy a .com/.me for yourself, and use firstname@lastname.me for
your professional email.

------
portfolioexec
If you have a first-class degree from a top institution, that's called "so
what?".

Spokeo fits in nicely I think, to answer the so what and offer a more rounded
view on prospective candidates.

It reduces asymetry of information and reduces the risk of adverse selection
by employers. In my opinion, having a good qualification is not enough of a
signal to being a good employee. It therefore provides essential information
that should ultimately benefit both parties.

That said, I don't think there's any substitute for a good face-to-face
interpersonal interaction to determine a person's character or suitability for
a role.

~~~
bootload
_".... People search is “the new black” ..."_

The data already exists so compiling it is a routine exercise. I wonder how
this kind of service could be fooled or played or worse misattributed?

 _"... Spokeo fits in nicely I think, to answer the so what and offer a more
rounded view on prospective candidates. ... It reduces asymetry (sic) of
information and reduces the risk of adverse selection by employers ..."_

It would do nothing to reduce risk. In fact I'd go further to say that
organisations that hire on unverified information are open to risk of future
legal action. This is information gathering at its worst. How does more
information of dubious quality on a candidate rule them out distinguishing
themselves at a given task? I would propose a counter application to the likes
of Spokeo - a registry of potential employers. Free along the line of
Craigslist. Someone looking for a job can view lists of companies by sectors
and geography, rated by what matters to employees and updated.

This is an example of asymmetry.

Companies may have more money but there are more employees than companies.
More data thrown at the employee allows greater scrutiny than what I guess
most companies would like. A comprehensive list of companies worldwide ranking
them by employee friendliness. More information in choice of companies you
work for might make you think twice before you apply. The cream of companies
rising to the top? For example imagine if you could view a company that you
thought might be a good place to work only to find company information:

\- In the press: current directors are constantly in the news for poor
financial results, mismanagement or outright law breaking.

\- Ethical status: encourage low wages and outsource, made no efforts to
improve greenhouse gas emissions

\- Enhancement: no effort to supply extra training

\- Finances: public finance information reported against the rest of the
market. For startups it might also have the VC's or publicly declared finance
as this has implications on how a company behaves.

\- Blunders: What was the last publicly acknowledged blunder? How was it
handled.

\- Relations: do they have induction? how do they handle various HR issues?

As you imagine if you start to put the spotlight back on companies that employ
people a lot of PR companies will be getting anxious calls.

Maybe it might force change?

 _"... I don't think there's any substitute for a good face-to-face
interpersonal interaction to determine a person's character or suitability for
a role. ..."_

This is one point I agree on. The problem, the best shady characters can fool
all but the most thorough of vetting. I'm not sure that software can play a
meaningful part in this process?

~~~
portfolioexec
I think your range of points on security, unverified information etc are all
valid.

My viewpoint is about gaining a more rounded understanding for a person's
character, i.e. using all available information on a candidate to try and
build a more accurate representation of them.

If Spokeo are offering some sort of verification service such as those offered
by Experian et al then I find this to be a flawed model.

~~~
bootload
_"... My viewpoint is about gaining a more rounded understanding for a
person's character, i.e. using all available information on a candidate to try
and build a more accurate representation of them. ..."_

I'm not sure more data is better trying to verify a candidate. You can infer
things by viewing a candidates flickr + twitter + blog but how do you know it
is not being spoofed, manipulated?

On the Internet anyone imitate a dog.

------
oldgregg
How are they getting access to facebook profiles???

~~~
handelaar
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.

~~~
indigoviolet
Are you sure your email address is not available on your profile -- even when
a search engine finds your profile?

~~~
potatolicious
Supposedly you can set the visibility of your email to non-friends or non-
network users. The problem here is that I have my FB email setting on private
(friends only), and yet somehow this site can see it.

Methinks they may be simply attempting to log in with that email as your
username... maybe Facebook returns a different error depending on non-existent
username vs. wrong password. Very dumb of FB in that case, and must be fixed.

~~~
Tritis
Email is still searchable, even if it is set to private. If someone types in
your email address, they obviously already have it...

------
tlrobinson
Obvious solution: put a different email address on your resume

~~~
fallentimes
Yeah seriously. Most of us have names that _someone_ on this planet also has
too.

Or if you're really scared, don't use LinkedIn/facebook/Myspace et al. I view
all of this stuff as filtering anyway. Would I really want to work at a place
that is appalled because there's a picture of me drinking beer on facebook?

------
markbao
Spokeo used to be a social network aggregator like Friendfeed or Socialthing.
[http://www.minger.net/wp-content/uploads/2006/11/spokeo-
page...](http://www.minger.net/wp-content/uploads/2006/11/spokeo-page.jpg)

Uh.

------
brk
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.

~~~
wayne
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.

------
DanielBMarkham
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.

~~~
unalone
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.

~~~
wayne
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.

------
satyajit
The site claims that 'look beyond resume' - is the data found in MySpace, FB,
Friendfeed a valuable data to any recruiter? I can see this being used only by
'snoopers'/'stalkers' - kinda thing that will bring nothing but bad name to
Social Networking. I still know a majority of the people who just do not go
onto eBay thinking its a congregation of fraudsters and phishers. This site
sucks.

------
eventhough
Spokeo is pretty creepy. They index all of Pandora's public channels so you
can see what kind of music your friends have been listening to.

------
okeumeni
Disturbing indeed, they betray the trust that these social networks sites
gives to crawlers. Most of these sites are available to crawlers it’s hard to
stop crawlers on case by case basis.

I tell all my friends (hackers and non hackers) to never post any information
or picture about you online that you are not comfortable sharing with
everyone. This is a great warning to everybody.

------
dkasper
Sounds similar to Rapleaf.

~~~
jonmc12
except Rapleaf lets you manage your reputation before they sell it off

------
gabrielleydon
Whatever you think about this new direction for spokeo one thing is for sure,
its working.

<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/spokeo.com/?metric=uv>

<http://www.quantcast.com/spokeo.com/traffic>

------
savrajsingh
here's the opposite -- a site where you google yourself and then comment on
and reorder the search results, and then share it with potential employers.
this requires you to be proactive, though. <http://hitbio.com>

------
LiveTimeCards
Yeah I agree, the fact that an HR person can easily type in your e-mail and
get all your personal details is a bit much. But, with that said, you honestly
should be using a different e-mail address on your job applications than your
personal e-mail.

------
rms
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?

~~~
wayne
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.

------
dangoldin
How amusing would it be if this site was just a way to collect emails?

In any case, they are probably getting a whole bunch of emails right now.

------
lallysingh
Rather undewhelming. I'm every hit for the first 5 pages of googling my name,
and these guys have almost nothing on me.

Muahahahahaha

------
LukeG
I don't like work stuff on Facebook...I just changed my profile pic to sign up
for a "professional" event.

------
13ren
...because it's an email harvester.

------
bmelina
I entered my email, but my facebook and linkedin profile didint show up...

------
louislouis
wow, the ultimate stalker tool is here... Ima go find my rapist/pedo glasses
just for this occasion.

------
lemonysnicket
but you decided to spread it anyways (to the tech recruiters and HR who lurk
here on HN)...

------
rokhayakebe
and disgusting.

~~~
run4yourlives
Why?

Last time I checked, nobody is putting your personal information online in a
public domain for you.

~~~
procrastitron
Actually, they are. Or at least, if you've ever donated to any political
campaign they are.

<http://fundrace.huffingtonpost.com/>

~~~
run4yourlives
The act of donating to a party is a public act though... unlike voting. You
declare it on your tax return for goodness sake.

~~~
procrastitron
You don't declare them in your tax return. Donations to political campaigns
are not tax deductible.

~~~
run4yourlives
Hmm, I didn't know that. They are up here in Canada.

------
popschedule
Too bad it didn't work on me.

