Stalkeo | Hacker News Reader

Stalkeo

blog.guykawasaki.com

13 pointskirubakaran16 comments

"The Spokeo process begins with providing your address book; your name and password at social-networking sites; or the URL of your friends' profile, photo album, website, or blog."

OMG !

Indeed. I was sceptical at first and then laughed it away when it asked for my passwords.

It's sad how many people continue filling it in anyway.

laziness vs paranoia

typically for most people laziness wins

There's no new privacy intrusion going on here. This service is simply an aggregator for data you could find on your own with a little effort. If anything, this will help people to think twice about what information they're making available on all the services it aggregates.

You are providing Spokeo with your credentials for all your social networking apps. Isn't that scary?

At least there is one solace: "Forgot your password? Enter the email address to your account and we will email you a link to reset your password."

This might mean they are not storing your Spokeo password in plain text.

Even if they store the passwords as MD5 hashes the system is still extremely vulnerable because of MD5 hash google searches as detailed a while back. Besides, the whole system is hub for potentially thousands of users passwords, and that would worry me a little.

I supposed it'd use it instead of yahoo pipes or other mashup services - giving it lists of my friends' myspace pages and looking for new comments for example - but I would never give it my passwords.

A bit of salt defeats MD5 hash google searches and rainbow tables. Not that I'm saying anything about these guys. :)

Well yeah, but I liked it better when the Internet was disaggregated.

At least then you had to spend hours looking at Google results to stalk someone.

And it was so much more rewarding afterwards. I've heard. cough

Just when I thought it couldn't get any creepier...

I think for most people, someone else having their social networking passwords would be mere annoyance, so if any product were at all compelling, they'd have no trouble giving them up. I know that's the case for me. It wouldn't be anywhere close to them getting my email or online banking passwords. The worst they could do is leave obscene comments on my friends' walls.

That said, this product doesn't seem very useful, and I wouldn't expect it to catch on.

Probably a hit. Most people outside our paranoid (hacker) demographic don't seem to care much about online privacy, so long as it doesn't involve them losing money.

Sounds like they need a good dose of this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=92745

Predator : Stalk, Yo!

Prey : Stalk, eee oh!

I don't think its necessarily a bad service, but it should have some sort of approval system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com