Spokeo, or Spooky-o?

Erick over at Techcrunch recently posted a review of the just-relaunched Spokeo, what one might call a web 2.0 aggregator. (Spokeo consequently experienced an onslaught of new registrations, including my own). FriendFeed, started by four ex-Googlers, is a similar service that has received more press, including a New York Times write-up. These services basically scour the web for updates from your friends on various web 2.0 services such as Pandora, Google Reader, and Amazon.com Wishlists, and consolidates them into a single feed. What you essentially have, then, is the equivalent of the Facebook News Feed for all web 2.0 services that have publicly accessible information. When your friends add pictures, make comments, listen to music, or add a book to their wish list, this information is delivered directly to an “inbox” where you can review and even comment on it.

Like many major innovations these days, this new type of service can be seen in both positive and negative lights. On the positive end, you no longer have to spend hours each week jumping from service to service looking for updates from your friends. It is the most efficient way to passively find out what your friends are up to in their online lives. Hopping onto Spokeo, FriendFeed, or a similar service, you can very quickly browse through photos, blog posts, and other updates. Strictly speaking in the interest of facilitating the flow of information not into or out of “the cloud,” but within the cloud itself… this sort of service is revolutionary.

Now for the scarier stuff.

Spokeo not only allows you to aggregate information on the friends that you specify, but it also automates that process. After registering, you simply enter the login information for your Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, or other web-based email account. Spokeo then proceeds to login to your email account and download your address book. Having compiled the e-mail addresses of all your contacts, Spokeo then cross-checks those addresses against 15 or so services with publicly accessible feeds or search services. For example, if I had a friend Bob with a certain email address, Spokeo would search MySpace for that address and see if any results return. If there is a MySpace account associated with his address, the update feed for that account is added to my Spokeo dashboard. This process repeats itself across all the addresses you provide through your email account, for all the services that Spokeo is able to troll.

Pretty cool, right? Here’s the rub: no one besides you knows who you’re tracking and what sites you’re tracking. When I signed up and went through the process, I was amazed to discover how many of my friends were on services I didn’t know they were on, and some on services I had never even heard of! And unless I tell them, they have no idea I’m watching every update they make. Maybe the reason I didn’t know about their presence on a certain service was precisely because they wanted to make it private, but they had no idea that their profile or account was searchable, linkable, and streamable by their email address.

So what’s the fallout on this? Should there be an equivalent of a robots.txt file for web 2.0 services, telling sites like Spokeo that they cannot automate the search and discover process? Should users of web 2.0 services specifically have to opt-in to having their feeds aggregated in such a way? Or are Spokeo’s practices legitimate?

Speak up in the comments.

Image used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user piccadillywilson