by Kenneth Andrews

Created on: January 29, 2011

Aggregator sites are nothing new, and many sites composed of aggregated content from various sources have been around for years, posing a dilemna to copyright owners (who of course want their content to be available to the greatest possible audience, but not if a third party is getting rich from the ad revenue in the process), but spokeo.com has encountered criticism for aggregating people's personal details and making them searchable by any internet user.

Spokeo has been described as a scam in forums across the Internet. The site crawls up to 50 potential sources of information (including public profiles on sites like facebook, flickr, LinkedIn, even amazon wishlists) to build up a complete picture of individuals. It is possible for an internet user to visit the site, search for their own name or that of a friend or family member and get complete personal details including addresses, telephone numbers, photos, marital status and even financial information.

When a ten second internet search can bring up a person's complete life history down to a satellite photo of their house, it is easy to see why people are alarmed by Spokeo, but as David Emery points out in his Urban Legends blog on About.com, the site can only aggregate information which has already been placed in the public domain, usually by the 'victims' themselves. Although people have some justification in feeling that spokeo (and sites like it) is invading their privacy, in actual fact the site provides an object lesson in why it is important to protect your personal data and be careful about trusting social networking sites with too many personal details.

Spokeo.com themselves have published a blog post insisting they are not a scam, which is of course an enormously clear sign that they are. Spokeo is being called a scam by people concerned that their details are available online in such detail. These people are perhaps not quite aware of the generally accepted definition of the word. A scam is a confidence trick, a deception. The people catalogued by spokeo are not being scammed, although it could be argued that they are being exploited, their personal information being sold by an organisation without their consent.

The real reason that spokeo.com is a scam is that it is effectively selling information which is already in the public domain, by selling full membership to eager snoopers whereby they can access 'full reports' of anyone for whom they search. Not only that, but there is no fact-checking stage in Spokeo's information aggregation, so the results can be misleading or wildly innaccurate.

It is the membership aspect which makes spokeo a scam. Members are paying for information which they could find just as easily via Google, and often it is information which is incorrect. If spokeo was funded by advertising revenue rather than a membership model it would just be a fairly squalid little site for nosey people - as it is, it's exploiting ordinary people and conning its paying members.

Spokeo is not the only aggregator site out there, and if it is seen to be successful then it will spawn even more imitations. Take care to protect personal information when using the Internet, and be very aware that anything posted online can potentially be seen by absolutely anyone.

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