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There are a number of paid services on the net where you give them an email address and they slurp up all the information out there associated with that person.
by rms 16y ago
There are a number of paid services on the net where you give them an email address and they slurp up all the information out there associated with that person.
http://www.spokeo.com http://www.spokeo.com is one of many and might be the one used in the article, though Spokeo gives you 3 months for your $15.
- orblivion 16y agoHow do they find out what you've used your email address for? Do they buy that info from the websites?
- maxawaytoolong 16y agoI don't know anything about Spokeo, but Rapleaf uses the APIs of various services, and when that isn't enough, they screen scrape.
- orblivion 16y ago> Rapleaf uses the APIs of various services Those APIs expose people's email addresses?
- maxawaytoolong 16y agoYes. If you already know someone's email address, you can get all sorts of information about them from twitter, fB, amazon wishlists...anything where the user's account is keyed to an email address.
- orblivion 16y agoSo... isn't there something in user agreements that avoids this sort of thing? Maybe I should read it closer, but I would expect "will not sell my email address to third parties" would be a common clause. And if it wasn't, I'd expect some sort of consumer backlash. Sorry for the line of questions, this is sortof a jolt to my view of reality.
- maxawaytoolong 16y agoThey aren't selling the email address to third parties - they are letting them access the information for free.