Spokeo is simply using the business mantra “ask for it, you would be surprised what people will give you.” However, I never authorized the release of my personal information to this third party and I’m fairly certain it is illegal for somebody else to release my private information, friend or not.

Within 60 minutes of making the LJ post, I had been contacted by Spokeo reps on both LJ and Facebook (the LJ comment was from a registered LJ user, “spokeo”. OK it was a public post, but 60 minutes??

The messages both said the same thing. They were encouraging me to copy my OUTLOOK (not webmail) address book to a .csv file and upload it to their site. Obviously an Outlook address file can contain real names, addresses, telephone numbers, and other information / notes.

This unwanted and incredibly bizarre personal attention I was receiving from Spokeo caused me to immediately close my LJ, Facebook and Hotmail accounts. A lot of my LJ posts were public, but I’d rarely recived comments from new users, and I was amazed that Spokeo were promoting their web service this way (which is also contrary to LJ TOS).

This “gimme your contact list” message convinces me (if I needed further convincing) that the owners of Spokeo are doing (or plan to do) far more with this information than simply track friends for subscribers.

I’ve made a strong complaint to LJ, and given the details of the approach to the US Department of Justice web fraud dept., and other North American agencies.

At the end of the day though, I’m still amazed that anyone would trust ANY of these web ’services’ (free or fee based) with a personal password. Unwarranted trust is the biggest security issue of all. If someone wanted your driver licence number, would you hand over your whole wallet and let them find it for themselves??

Wait a sec, that’s actually a point I’d like to make. One upside of Spokeo and similar services is they add an element of transparency, and personal accountability, to the web that users have previously escaped. Anonymity on the web, and anonymity in general, as numerous psychology studies have shown, can lead to pretty inhumane and unethical behavior.

I may be some kind of social radical, but I don’t think that everyone has an inherent right to total privacy.

That being said, the bottom line is that, when I communicate, I do have the right to know who will likely hear/read/react to it.

Plus, I do not think the general public (with the intense individualism that pervades the U.S.) will stand for these types services as they exist now, just as Facebook became mainstream, the public demanded that it integrate extensive and sophisticated privacy controls over the news feed, etc.