Spokeo is Spooky - O

Online privacy and Spokeo

Will Spokeo Kill Social Media?

Every day people log on to sites like Facebook and talk about their lives, interests, and purchases. If you created a search engine that could combine that information with publicly available data such as credit history, home value, and other reports, you could create a very revealing profile of anyone. Right now, that information is difficult to gather. After all, we don't reveal our personal and private life details in one bunch at a single site, we do it in bits and pieces of online exchanges that are scattered across the Web.

Spokeo Shares Your Personal Data with Everyone

Spokeo.com is a new site that is already receving some "blowback" because of it's intrusiveness. I logged on and found a mish-mash of true information and faulty facts. The possibility that someone could log on and access my creditworthiness from this site is frightening.

Don't Think You Can Hide Behind a Screen Name - Spokeo will find you

Have a screen name? That's a start to assure privacy, but if you've associated your screen name and your real name on any Web page, Spokeo can link you together. If anything can put a halt to social media, it will be search engines like this, which will scrape together all your online conversations and build these informational sites. Right now, Spokeo does not do the job very well, or very accurately, but others will come along with a more robust technique.