15 ms·

Creeping as a Service

358 points by dshipper 6y ago

transitivebs 6y ago
Def reminds me of https://www.flock.network https://www.flock.network as well
AlphaWeaver 6y ago
If you want to use this service without signing up, you can browse someone's profile directly at https://spoonbill.io/data/<username> https://spoonbill.io/data/<username>
- dylan604 6y ago
  is this by design, or just lazy coding?
- gfody 6y ago
  facilitating crass creeping as a service where one monitors spoonbill for removal requests for the really interesting stuff
- woko 6y ago
  This only works if someone who follows this <username> has already signed up to the service.
jcun4128 6y ago
man... stuff like this makes me glad I'm more socially/internet aware than I was before breadcrumbs
spongechameleon 6y ago
While this made me feel creeped out at first, that “metadata” all seems like the public information that we intend to share when we signup for a service like Twitter.
- remram 6y ago
  Basic but important things such as renames don't even show up...
- detaro 6y ago
  Systematic collection and archiving of "metadata" is not the same as data being available at some point in time. (It's really the same as the arguments against other automated surveillance: it's "public metadata" where your car is on public roads, but a country-wide database based on automated scans is still different than the fact that someone can follow you around manually)
kyleblarson 6y ago
Every time I learn about stuff like this I'm glad that I left the toxic cesspool that is social media years ago. (Of course I don't include HN in this category.)
- SCUSKU 6y ago
  I am with you there. Sometimes though I wish HN'ers were a little more compassionate to their fellow hackers. I suppose everything can't be perfect though.
  - kreeben 6y ago
    >> though I wish HN'ers were a little more compassionate to their fellow hackers The reason why HN'ers are not always kind to other HN'ers is, because HN is nothing more and nothing less than social media, albeit at its finest.
tppiotrowski 6y ago
> Social apps have made creepers out of all of us. Back in the AOL Instant Messenger days of the early 2000's there was a service like this that tracked users' "Away Messages". People definitely tweaked those repeatedly as well :)
gumby 6y ago
Who cares? I don't mean "who cares about this article"; I found it worth the read. What I really mean is: is there really that much interest, or even that much of interest, in the edits of peoples' autobiographical sound bites? We "learn" that Elon Musk is indeed self-centered and image-obsessed. Big deal, I'm sure he hopes that you think so, and you already knew so before reading this. Anyone whose net worth is tied to their public image and fandom is almost certainly the same. It's also not clear how much of those changes are actually his personality and how much are simply consistent with his public persona. A delta between the two would be interesting but almost by definition impossible to determine from this info. Don't get me wrong: I'm sure there is a fascinating PhD or two to be found in this info. But for any ordinary person (including journalists or TMZ employee) are there any real, insightful nuggets in what is explicitly the process of curation?
- Swizec 6y ago
  People care. As evidence I present the entire yellow journalism, reality show, and influencer industry. There’s an entire meme economy built on top of things like the batchelor. None of those people are even noteworthy. People really really care.
  - gumby 6y ago
    I understand that many people are interested in celebrity. (That's why I included people like "TMZ employee" as "ordinary people"). I really meant the ephemera of autographical edits. It seemed as relevant as collecting used cocktail napkins of celebrities. A parallel comment to yours suggests its fodder for "gotcha" posts. I guess that makes sense for those who like that, so does answer, a little, my "who cares" question.
- detaro 6y ago
  It's "awesome" to make sure that if someone ever had something in there that's now embarrassing or wrong you can taunt them with it without having to have stalked them yourself. Stalker paradise.
  - 6y ago
McMini 6y ago
If they track 10,000,000 accounts, does this mean they make millions of request towards Twitter every minute? Isn't that against Twitters terms?
- codetrotter 6y ago
  They might be paying Twitter for enterprise API access. https://developer.twitter.com/en/products/twitter-api/enterprise https://developer.twitter.com/en/products/twitter-api/enterp...
  - vincentmarle 6y ago
    I'm not seeing anything about pricing. How do they make money?
    - filoleg 6y ago
      > I'm not seeing anything about pricing. How do they make money? Right next to the "Apply for enterprise access" button, there is a giant block of text saying "Our enterprise solutions are customized with predictable pricing". Basically, they make money, because that API access isn't free. They don't list the actual price there because, as it is the case with most enterprise sales, there is no fixed pricing, and they work out individual deals on a case-by-case basis (which is based on the number of requests you expect your API to make per day/hour, volume discounts, long-term contract discounts, etc.). Long story short, there is a price on it, but to find out what it is, you will have to apply. And the price you will get will probably not be representative of the price other people/enterprises get, but at least you will know what it will cost for your specific company/project.
dvt 6y ago
I wouldn't really call tracking public biography diffs "creeping" though. Either way, this may be interesting, but is there an actual viable business here? Would anyone pay to see this information tracked? Maybe journalists?
egypturnash 6y ago
Damn this sure is about a level of Giving A Fuck About Twitter than I have never achieved in the thirteen years I've been on Twitter. Like, I just looked at the data Spoonbill has on my account and it's just a set of "egypturnash changed their website/bio/location" entries in mid-May 2020, which is when I assume this site first decided to look at my profile. Also this sure is a stealth ad and a half for Spoonbill.
- alpb 6y ago
  They have records in there since 2014, so I'm not sure if it's a project that has a monetization plan after even 7 years of existing. It's a quite fun app, and people used to these mash-ups in early days of Web 2.0 and REST APIs. It's not more than that. Although I just signed up, and hoping I can track people’s employment changes (I don't use LinkedIn).
bartread 6y ago
Back in 2013, at the intersection of peak .ly domain usage, crazy amounts of information available through Facebook's graph APIs (as well as other social networks), widespread GPS-equipped smartphone usage, and free and open APIs literally everywhere (including Google maps), along with my own re-education as a then-modern web developer after years of mostly desktop app development, I realised it would be possible to plot the movements of anyone you "knew" online within a pretty good margin of error in most cases using their social media updates. As a joke - let me emphasise: AS A JOKE (we'll get to this in a minute) - I seriously considered (aware of the irony) registering stalk.ly as a domain name with Libyan Spider and using it to host a site that billed itself as an online private investigation agency with the tagline, "We'll find out what you need to know... for a price." The whole thing was overall going to look as shady as reasonably possible. You'd be able to find out exactly what you'd been up to and where you'd been based on your social media posts, with a timeline, map view, etc. There'd be a sign-up option that would offer you the ability to do the same for your "friends". Worried your partner has been having an affair? No problem: slap their profile URL in here and we'll tell you exactly what they've been up to and where they've been up to it, etc. Want to know what your kids or employees have been up to? We've got that covered too. Oh yeah. The point was to highlight how much oversharing most of us do online, and how unaware we all often are of how much information about our lives we're really giving away. Also I was more than a bit curious about how many people would actually try to sign up, and I thought it might be funny. Fortunately (I think, although I still wonder sometimes) my tendency to laziness kicked in and I never actually implemented it. I was also a bit concerned about the possibility of unintended consequences that could be personally detrimental. I have no doubt Facebook et all would have gone ber-effin-zerk once they'd spotted the app, but that wasn't my major concern - I was more worried about the reaction of friends, and my employer, if by some chance it had gained some traction. The ideal outcome would have been for it to provide a certain amount of entertainment for a while, and possibly drawn some small attention to issues of privacy that - prior to that point - had very much been minority concerns. Still, I was quite worried about it backfiring.
- muttled 6y ago
  The real plot twist would be if you send a message to the user they were stalking letting them know who made the attempt.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
balls187 6y ago
Not really related, but Budgie Smuggler is the Australian common name for men's speedo like swimwear. The name is derived from the fact that the look of a man's privates while wearing the swim wear appears as if the man is hiding (smuggling) a small bird (a budgie) down his pants. Hence, Budgie Smuggler.
- _underfl0w_ 6y ago
  FWIW the U.S. equivalent is "banana hammock".
- robocat 6y ago
  A company has gone to town on the theme: https://budgysmuggler.com.au/collections/mens-swimwear https://budgysmuggler.com.au/collections/mens-swimwear Not affiliated, I just think it is a laugh.
Debug_Overload 6y ago
Stuff like this makes our online presence very creepy. More than I personally used to think anyway. Even on platforms where people usually think of their accounts as "throwaway" or "anonymous". Take Reddit. Besides the well-known archive sites that keep removed/deleted content (removeddit, ceddit, etc), there is this cool service (pushshift) that offers all that and more. One interesting and relevant feature of this tool is the ability to look up all content by a specific author/username. You just put the name there, and lo and behold, everything this person ever posted is right there; even if it's deleted, or removed. If you do a quick test using this tool, you'll soon see the amount of people who thought their deleted content couldn't be tied back to them, continuing to use their usernames like nothing happened. The deleted content can sometimes be incredibly sensitive information that the person posted by mistake (or when looking for advice, having a rant about something, etc). It sometimes includes very specific details that may uniquely identify a person. And most users aren't aware of any of this. And it's available even if you delete your account. Someone just has to know that you used this username once upon a time. The tool eventually removed this option from the UI (but it's still available through their API). The thread where this removal was announced is interesting and reveals how useful this tool was to some users on Reddit for combating spam/harassment (or even to find their own content), but nevertheless this dark side of it is there. As you might expect, someone slapped a new UI on that very tool, and that feature is readily available today, few google searches away. When I saw this tool, it really reminded me of that. It's incredible how our online activities became permanent, no matter how much we try to erase the parts we don't like (or don't want to be public).
- offtop5 6y ago
  Tools like this are why I stopped using Reddit ( aside from talking about programming). And I assume anything I post here may eventually be traced back to me. Even if you do change your username regularly, your patterns of speech may stay rather similar. And no matter what you say, the context around it may change in 30 years or so. This new generation loves to screenshot personal conversations and then post them to Reddit for brownie points. Meaning if you get involved with someone who's slightly malicious, they can easily ruin your life too. At this point I'm very careful to only meet folks in person. It's not unheard of for people to share compromising details about themselves, only to become extortion victims.
jameslk 6y ago
I've been wondering when something like this would be made. I've felt that it would be even more disgusting to track changes on LinkedIn profiles (imagine these changes being purchased by companies where you're interviewing). Unfortunately the web is open and there's nothing really to stop it, sans regulations and trust that they will be enforced. Once your life is on the internet you might as well assume everything you say or do is being tracked in some version control repository for humans.
- technick 6y ago
  I did a vendor review last year for a SaaS which tracks the changes of your employees linkedin profiles (they also partnered with monster and a few other job boards). The service is used by HR departments to measure employee happiness and risk rate which person is looking.
  - rdslw 6y ago
    can you share vendoor name/url ? thanks!
- recursive 6y ago
  How is this disgusting? I'm pretty out of the loop with social media. But I'm assuming the major networks have the concept of a "private" profile. And I assume that such profiles wouldn't be available on this service. If I'm wrong about the existence of private profiles, then the problem isn't this service. The problem would be publishing information publicly that they wish to remain private.
  - jameslk 6y ago
    I guess I find it slimey in the sense that when you update your profile, you're usually not expecting the old information to follow you around. Someone may remove information because it hurts their career (e.g. removing information that can reveal your age). Or perhaps they've switched careers and if someone sees that it might be used against them. The point of using LinkedIn for an employee is to help sell their self. Would they use LinkedIn differently if they knew these changes would be tracked and potentially betray their intended use of the platform? Of course you and I know better, but I don't think most people know their digital lives are so easily tracked and sold.
rl3 6y ago
In the past I've theorized people do this for HN comments to track edits. As a serial edit-until-finally-satisfied poster, I suppose it's nice to know that those edits are taking up terabytes of data in such systems. :)
- mkj 6y ago
  Eventually HN will get hacked (doesn't everyone?) and all the upvotes/downvotes will be revealed too!
joncp 6y ago
Information wants to be free. If you post information in a public forum then that information can take on a life of its own. I'm just surprised that people are surprised by that.
baxtr 6y ago
Seems like they don't have any European accounts? Probably because they don't want to deal with the GDPR issues? PS: I only checked a couple or so.
- gls2ro 6y ago
  Yes they have. Check for example vonderleyen the president of EU Commission
smit2300 6y ago
The content here is definitely a useful meditation on what people's core ideals are over time, but I think it paints a really shallow image of human beings. Of course people's Twitter bios change over time, they're a roughly 25-word blurb, not a perfect representation of the individual running the account. People are allowed to feel some topics need more limelight than others at certain times of history, that doesn't mean they're some horrible vulture using the cause for personal gain. Just because you take Bernie2020 or BlackLivesMatter out of your Twitter bio doesn't mean you stop caring about those things, it just means you changed your Twitter bio.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
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- brianjunyinchan 6y ago
  Well said. Social dynamics would continue as pre Internet if humans naturally understood this extension. It seems profile pics with statuses turned out to be the complexity level sufficient for humans to begin conflating these abstractions with reality Cases like this illustrate how electronic information is perception tech that has scaled human abilities much further than the printing press did, but with incorrect abstractions that have compounded over time, at the expense of our relationships... We can’t stop human culture from evolving, but we would do well to measure more of where we’re headed. The best related examples off the top of my head is how debates via democracy were had at some point as we decided how juvenile criminal records work Related, sonder is significant because it is a rare feeling https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/23536922667/sonder https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/23536922667/...
tobias2014 6y ago
Is archive.org then also creeping as a service?
- iJohnDoe 6y ago
  Yes, it is.
dmlittle 6y ago
I thought about creating a similar service for LinkedIn (targeted for recruiters) with the hypothesis that people updating their LinkedIn profiles are more likely to be searching or open to new jobs. Ultimately decided the creepiness was too high and that such tool shouldn't exist. There's also the caveat that while recruiters might be able to better target people in the market, HR can also identify people potentially job searching and punish them.
- guessbest 6y ago
  Its just a step before Doxxing as a Service.
brundolf 6y ago
One of my favorite subtle Twitter changes was "Tim Apple": https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/7/18254958/tim-cook-apple-trump-username-changed-twitter-name-potus-president https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/7/18254958/tim-cook-apple-tr...
patrickdward 6y ago
This takes me back to the early days of thefacebook.com before the news feed existed and you regularly checked classmates' profiles for updates.
kgin 6y ago
This reminds me of the moment Facebook redesigned profiles as "timelines" making it possible for anyone to zoom back 5 years and read status updates that you thought were lost to obscurity. Was the information always public? Yes. But the difficulty in accessing it meant that only the most obsessive stalker would find their way back to it. Making difficult-to-access public information extremely easy to access is type of privacy change.
bloaf 6y ago
Someone should make a profile noise generator that frequently updates profiles with non-substantive changes to make such tools less interesting.
iJohnDoe 6y ago
This is awful. One more way to add to the social cooling. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363 You already have to think about everything you do online. Now you have to think about something you do even if it’s posted for a second. Some service is going to monitor it or one of the archive crusades will snap it up. This was already a concern, but now it’s more apparent. Now we have enterprise level employee monitoring for the internet. None of this is new. It’s just getting worse. I fear for our future generations where they are discovering themselves and happen to post something online over their life journey and it’s immediately snapped up to be used against them later in life. We’ve been talking about this for years. What a shame we’re at this point. One day there will be a revolt to the internet. It will take a while, but it will happen.
arthurcolle 6y ago
Doesn't seem to work anymore
sarvasana 6y ago
Death to services like this.
PhantomBKB 6y ago
This is disgusting
nelsonenzo 6y ago
This is some serious in depth writing that speaks a lot of truths that platforms do not want to talk about: how they feed you data is not anywhere close to how the data is best consumed, and how that doesn't matter to the platforms success. The LinkedIn analysis referred to in the article was really telling as well. I've been thinking about this in terms of credit files recently. There are services that let you check it daily, but they don't provide a daily time series of the data - that's really where the value is and it's why they don't provide a consumer api.

358 points by dshipper 6y ago

Def reminds me of https://www.flock.network https://www.flock.network as well

If you want to use this service without signing up, you can browse someone's profile directly at https://spoonbill.io/data/<username> https://spoonbill.io/data/<username>

dylan604 6y ago
is this by design, or just lazy coding?
gfody 6y ago
facilitating crass creeping as a service where one monitors spoonbill for removal requests for the really interesting stuff
woko 6y ago
This only works if someone who follows this <username> has already signed up to the service.

jcun4128 6y ago

man... stuff like this makes me glad I'm more socially/internet aware than I was before breadcrumbs

spongechameleon 6y ago

While this made me feel creeped out at first, that “metadata” all seems like the public information that we intend to share when we signup for a service like Twitter.

remram 6y ago
Basic but important things such as renames don't even show up...
detaro 6y ago
Systematic collection and archiving of "metadata" is not the same as data being available at some point in time. (It's really the same as the arguments against other automated surveillance: it's "public metadata" where your car is on public roads, but a country-wide database based on automated scans is still different than the fact that someone can follow you around manually)

kyleblarson 6y ago

Every time I learn about stuff like this I'm glad that I left the toxic cesspool that is social media years ago. (Of course I don't include HN in this category.)

SCUSKU 6y ago
I am with you there. Sometimes though I wish HN'ers were a little more compassionate to their fellow hackers. I suppose everything can't be perfect though.
- kreeben 6y ago
  >> though I wish HN'ers were a little more compassionate to their fellow hackers The reason why HN'ers are not always kind to other HN'ers is, because HN is nothing more and nothing less than social media, albeit at its finest.

tppiotrowski 6y ago

> Social apps have made creepers out of all of us. Back in the AOL Instant Messenger days of the early 2000's there was a service like this that tracked users' "Away Messages". People definitely tweaked those repeatedly as well :)

gumby 6y ago

Who cares? I don't mean "who cares about this article"; I found it worth the read. What I really mean is: is there really that much interest, or even that much of interest, in the edits of peoples' autobiographical sound bites? We "learn" that Elon Musk is indeed self-centered and image-obsessed. Big deal, I'm sure he hopes that you think so, and you already knew so before reading this. Anyone whose net worth is tied to their public image and fandom is almost certainly the same. It's also not clear how much of those changes are actually his personality and how much are simply consistent with his public persona. A delta between the two would be interesting but almost by definition impossible to determine from this info. Don't get me wrong: I'm sure there is a fascinating PhD or two to be found in this info. But for any ordinary person (including journalists or TMZ employee) are there any real, insightful nuggets in what is explicitly the process of curation?

Swizec 6y ago
People care. As evidence I present the entire yellow journalism, reality show, and influencer industry. There’s an entire meme economy built on top of things like the batchelor. None of those people are even noteworthy. People really really care.
- gumby 6y ago
  I understand that many people are interested in celebrity. (That's why I included people like "TMZ employee" as "ordinary people"). I really meant the ephemera of autographical edits. It seemed as relevant as collecting used cocktail napkins of celebrities. A parallel comment to yours suggests its fodder for "gotcha" posts. I guess that makes sense for those who like that, so does answer, a little, my "who cares" question.
detaro 6y ago
It's "awesome" to make sure that if someone ever had something in there that's now embarrassing or wrong you can taunt them with it without having to have stalked them yourself. Stalker paradise.
- 6y ago

McMini 6y ago

If they track 10,000,000 accounts, does this mean they make millions of request towards Twitter every minute? Isn't that against Twitters terms?

codetrotter 6y ago
They might be paying Twitter for enterprise API access. https://developer.twitter.com/en/products/twitter-api/enterprise https://developer.twitter.com/en/products/twitter-api/enterp...
- vincentmarle 6y ago
  I'm not seeing anything about pricing. How do they make money?
  - filoleg 6y ago
    > I'm not seeing anything about pricing. How do they make money? Right next to the "Apply for enterprise access" button, there is a giant block of text saying "Our enterprise solutions are customized with predictable pricing". Basically, they make money, because that API access isn't free. They don't list the actual price there because, as it is the case with most enterprise sales, there is no fixed pricing, and they work out individual deals on a case-by-case basis (which is based on the number of requests you expect your API to make per day/hour, volume discounts, long-term contract discounts, etc.). Long story short, there is a price on it, but to find out what it is, you will have to apply. And the price you will get will probably not be representative of the price other people/enterprises get, but at least you will know what it will cost for your specific company/project.

dvt 6y ago

I wouldn't really call tracking public biography diffs "creeping" though. Either way, this may be interesting, but is there an actual viable business here? Would anyone pay to see this information tracked? Maybe journalists?

egypturnash 6y ago

Damn this sure is about a level of Giving A Fuck About Twitter than I have never achieved in the thirteen years I've been on Twitter. Like, I just looked at the data Spoonbill has on my account and it's just a set of "egypturnash changed their website/bio/location" entries in mid-May 2020, which is when I assume this site first decided to look at my profile. Also this sure is a stealth ad and a half for Spoonbill.

alpb 6y ago
They have records in there since 2014, so I'm not sure if it's a project that has a monetization plan after even 7 years of existing. It's a quite fun app, and people used to these mash-ups in early days of Web 2.0 and REST APIs. It's not more than that. Although I just signed up, and hoping I can track people’s employment changes (I don't use LinkedIn).

bartread 6y ago

Back in 2013, at the intersection of peak .ly domain usage, crazy amounts of information available through Facebook's graph APIs (as well as other social networks), widespread GPS-equipped smartphone usage, and free and open APIs literally everywhere (including Google maps), along with my own re-education as a then-modern web developer after years of mostly desktop app development, I realised it would be possible to plot the movements of anyone you "knew" online within a pretty good margin of error in most cases using their social media updates. As a joke - let me emphasise: AS A JOKE (we'll get to this in a minute) - I seriously considered (aware of the irony) registering stalk.ly as a domain name with Libyan Spider and using it to host a site that billed itself as an online private investigation agency with the tagline, "We'll find out what you need to know... for a price." The whole thing was overall going to look as shady as reasonably possible. You'd be able to find out exactly what you'd been up to and where you'd been based on your social media posts, with a timeline, map view, etc. There'd be a sign-up option that would offer you the ability to do the same for your "friends". Worried your partner has been having an affair? No problem: slap their profile URL in here and we'll tell you exactly what they've been up to and where they've been up to it, etc. Want to know what your kids or employees have been up to? We've got that covered too. Oh yeah. The point was to highlight how much oversharing most of us do online, and how unaware we all often are of how much information about our lives we're really giving away. Also I was more than a bit curious about how many people would actually try to sign up, and I thought it might be funny. Fortunately (I think, although I still wonder sometimes) my tendency to laziness kicked in and I never actually implemented it. I was also a bit concerned about the possibility of unintended consequences that could be personally detrimental. I have no doubt Facebook et all would have gone ber-effin-zerk once they'd spotted the app, but that wasn't my major concern - I was more worried about the reaction of friends, and my employer, if by some chance it had gained some traction. The ideal outcome would have been for it to provide a certain amount of entertainment for a while, and possibly drawn some small attention to issues of privacy that - prior to that point - had very much been minority concerns. Still, I was quite worried about it backfiring.

muttled 6y ago
The real plot twist would be if you send a message to the user they were stalking letting them know who made the attempt.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

balls187 6y ago

Not really related, but Budgie Smuggler is the Australian common name for men's speedo like swimwear. The name is derived from the fact that the look of a man's privates while wearing the swim wear appears as if the man is hiding (smuggling) a small bird (a budgie) down his pants. Hence, Budgie Smuggler.

_underfl0w_ 6y ago
FWIW the U.S. equivalent is "banana hammock".
robocat 6y ago
A company has gone to town on the theme: https://budgysmuggler.com.au/collections/mens-swimwear https://budgysmuggler.com.au/collections/mens-swimwear Not affiliated, I just think it is a laugh.

Debug_Overload 6y ago

Stuff like this makes our online presence very creepy. More than I personally used to think anyway. Even on platforms where people usually think of their accounts as "throwaway" or "anonymous". Take Reddit. Besides the well-known archive sites that keep removed/deleted content (removeddit, ceddit, etc), there is this cool service (pushshift) that offers all that and more. One interesting and relevant feature of this tool is the ability to look up all content by a specific author/username. You just put the name there, and lo and behold, everything this person ever posted is right there; even if it's deleted, or removed. If you do a quick test using this tool, you'll soon see the amount of people who thought their deleted content couldn't be tied back to them, continuing to use their usernames like nothing happened. The deleted content can sometimes be incredibly sensitive information that the person posted by mistake (or when looking for advice, having a rant about something, etc). It sometimes includes very specific details that may uniquely identify a person. And most users aren't aware of any of this. And it's available even if you delete your account. Someone just has to know that you used this username once upon a time. The tool eventually removed this option from the UI (but it's still available through their API). The thread where this removal was announced is interesting and reveals how useful this tool was to some users on Reddit for combating spam/harassment (or even to find their own content), but nevertheless this dark side of it is there. As you might expect, someone slapped a new UI on that very tool, and that feature is readily available today, few google searches away. When I saw this tool, it really reminded me of that. It's incredible how our online activities became permanent, no matter how much we try to erase the parts we don't like (or don't want to be public).

offtop5 6y ago
Tools like this are why I stopped using Reddit ( aside from talking about programming). And I assume anything I post here may eventually be traced back to me. Even if you do change your username regularly, your patterns of speech may stay rather similar. And no matter what you say, the context around it may change in 30 years or so. This new generation loves to screenshot personal conversations and then post them to Reddit for brownie points. Meaning if you get involved with someone who's slightly malicious, they can easily ruin your life too. At this point I'm very careful to only meet folks in person. It's not unheard of for people to share compromising details about themselves, only to become extortion victims.

jameslk 6y ago

I've been wondering when something like this would be made. I've felt that it would be even more disgusting to track changes on LinkedIn profiles (imagine these changes being purchased by companies where you're interviewing). Unfortunately the web is open and there's nothing really to stop it, sans regulations and trust that they will be enforced. Once your life is on the internet you might as well assume everything you say or do is being tracked in some version control repository for humans.

technick 6y ago
I did a vendor review last year for a SaaS which tracks the changes of your employees linkedin profiles (they also partnered with monster and a few other job boards). The service is used by HR departments to measure employee happiness and risk rate which person is looking.
- rdslw 6y ago
  can you share vendoor name/url ? thanks!
recursive 6y ago
How is this disgusting? I'm pretty out of the loop with social media. But I'm assuming the major networks have the concept of a "private" profile. And I assume that such profiles wouldn't be available on this service. If I'm wrong about the existence of private profiles, then the problem isn't this service. The problem would be publishing information publicly that they wish to remain private.
- jameslk 6y ago
  I guess I find it slimey in the sense that when you update your profile, you're usually not expecting the old information to follow you around. Someone may remove information because it hurts their career (e.g. removing information that can reveal your age). Or perhaps they've switched careers and if someone sees that it might be used against them. The point of using LinkedIn for an employee is to help sell their self. Would they use LinkedIn differently if they knew these changes would be tracked and potentially betray their intended use of the platform? Of course you and I know better, but I don't think most people know their digital lives are so easily tracked and sold.

rl3 6y ago

In the past I've theorized people do this for HN comments to track edits. As a serial edit-until-finally-satisfied poster, I suppose it's nice to know that those edits are taking up terabytes of data in such systems. :)

mkj 6y ago
Eventually HN will get hacked (doesn't everyone?) and all the upvotes/downvotes will be revealed too!

joncp 6y ago

Information wants to be free. If you post information in a public forum then that information can take on a life of its own. I'm just surprised that people are surprised by that.

baxtr 6y ago

Seems like they don't have any European accounts? Probably because they don't want to deal with the GDPR issues? PS: I only checked a couple or so.

gls2ro 6y ago
Yes they have. Check for example vonderleyen the president of EU Commission

smit2300 6y ago

The content here is definitely a useful meditation on what people's core ideals are over time, but I think it paints a really shallow image of human beings. Of course people's Twitter bios change over time, they're a roughly 25-word blurb, not a perfect representation of the individual running the account. People are allowed to feel some topics need more limelight than others at certain times of history, that doesn't mean they're some horrible vulture using the cause for personal gain. Just because you take Bernie2020 or BlackLivesMatter out of your Twitter bio doesn't mean you stop caring about those things, it just means you changed your Twitter bio.

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brianjunyinchan 6y ago
Well said. Social dynamics would continue as pre Internet if humans naturally understood this extension. It seems profile pics with statuses turned out to be the complexity level sufficient for humans to begin conflating these abstractions with reality Cases like this illustrate how electronic information is perception tech that has scaled human abilities much further than the printing press did, but with incorrect abstractions that have compounded over time, at the expense of our relationships... We can’t stop human culture from evolving, but we would do well to measure more of where we’re headed. The best related examples off the top of my head is how debates via democracy were had at some point as we decided how juvenile criminal records work Related, sonder is significant because it is a rare feeling https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/23536922667/sonder https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/23536922667/...

tobias2014 6y ago

Is archive.org then also creeping as a service?

iJohnDoe 6y ago
Yes, it is.

dmlittle 6y ago

I thought about creating a similar service for LinkedIn (targeted for recruiters) with the hypothesis that people updating their LinkedIn profiles are more likely to be searching or open to new jobs. Ultimately decided the creepiness was too high and that such tool shouldn't exist. There's also the caveat that while recruiters might be able to better target people in the market, HR can also identify people potentially job searching and punish them.

guessbest 6y ago
Its just a step before Doxxing as a Service.

brundolf 6y ago

One of my favorite subtle Twitter changes was "Tim Apple": https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/7/18254958/tim-cook-apple-trump-username-changed-twitter-name-potus-president https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/7/18254958/tim-cook-apple-tr...

patrickdward 6y ago

This takes me back to the early days of thefacebook.com before the news feed existed and you regularly checked classmates' profiles for updates.

kgin 6y ago

This reminds me of the moment Facebook redesigned profiles as "timelines" making it possible for anyone to zoom back 5 years and read status updates that you thought were lost to obscurity. Was the information always public? Yes. But the difficulty in accessing it meant that only the most obsessive stalker would find their way back to it. Making difficult-to-access public information extremely easy to access is type of privacy change.

bloaf 6y ago

Someone should make a profile noise generator that frequently updates profiles with non-substantive changes to make such tools less interesting.

iJohnDoe 6y ago

This is awful. One more way to add to the social cooling. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363 You already have to think about everything you do online. Now you have to think about something you do even if it’s posted for a second. Some service is going to monitor it or one of the archive crusades will snap it up. This was already a concern, but now it’s more apparent. Now we have enterprise level employee monitoring for the internet. None of this is new. It’s just getting worse. I fear for our future generations where they are discovering themselves and happen to post something online over their life journey and it’s immediately snapped up to be used against them later in life. We’ve been talking about this for years. What a shame we’re at this point. One day there will be a revolt to the internet. It will take a while, but it will happen.

arthurcolle 6y ago

Doesn't seem to work anymore

sarvasana 6y ago

Death to services like this.

PhantomBKB 6y ago

This is disgusting

nelsonenzo 6y ago

This is some serious in depth writing that speaks a lot of truths that platforms do not want to talk about: how they feed you data is not anywhere close to how the data is best consumed, and how that doesn't matter to the platforms success. The LinkedIn analysis referred to in the article was really telling as well. I've been thinking about this in terms of credit files recently. There are services that let you check it daily, but they don't provide a daily time series of the data - that's really where the value is and it's why they don't provide a consumer api.