Comments on: Rapleaf and privacy

By: Katherine

Katherine — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 10:12:56 +0000

SK, I have no idea. I had assumed that because I had marked my Facebook profile as private that it was just that. This post tends to suggest that this may not be the case. However, I checked the Rapeleaf site and they have one email address for me that is undoubtedly glean-able from any number of different sources. If they’d seen into my private Facebook profile they should/would have seen a second, so I felt a little bit better about it.

By: evsompkerl

evsompkerl — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 22:30:36 +0000

Hello! Good Site! Thanks you! shheskzaay

By: agm

agm — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 19:22:22 +0000

I have such a unique name that I learned several years ago to not broadcast it. And to do things pseudonymously or anonymously if I’m not sure of their reliability or not willing to gamble on the info getting around and biting me in the butt later.

A bit of paranoia about personal information is worthwhile. I even tell businesspeople to talk to their credit card processor about anonymizing card numbers when I come across a place that prints the number completely and in the clear (it still happens at places that haven’t gotten a new card swiper in a long time).

By: Sk

Sk — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 16:45:08 +0000

Katherine-
So, is the issue that such privacy-tags aren’t working? Because if it is working, then there’s no issue-right? People who don’t want their information ‘public’ tag it as ‘private.’ People who don’t tag it as ‘private’ presumably don’t want it ‘private?’

By: Katherine

Katherine — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 14:46:39 +0000

Well, SK, you can register and post with these social networking sites and make your information private such that you can say which categories of people can see it. I myself have said that people I have registered as my “friends” are the only people who can see my profile, and have made sure that the only people who are my “friends” are actually people who are my friends. So no, the point is not necessarily to share the information with the outside world.

By: Sk

Sk — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 14:22:53 +0000

“Rapleaf have figured out ways to get at some information from social networking sites that the users of these sites mightn’t have wanted to share with the outside world”

If you don’t want to share it with the outside world, why would you post it on a public social network website? I thought the entire point of these types of sites was to share it with the outside world.
Sk

By: duaneg

duaneg — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 09:59:32 +0000

I can’t understand giving out the username and password to your email accounts. What are they thinking? That has disturbing implications far beyond just collating public data.

By: anon

anon — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 03:29:30 +0000

Wish lists at Amazon can be marked as private.

By: aaron

aaron — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 01:35:02 +0000

Seriously, this is nothing new. Privacy concerns have been a part of facebook and myspace all along, and the logical next step is to aggregate data from multiple places on the web.

However, anyone who is interested in privacy can change their settings on facebook, make sure that their email address isn’t publicly available (always a good idea anyhow), and generally be aware that they shouldn’t put data about themselves on the internet that they don’t want to be publicly available. What rapleaf is doing could be done fairly easily by anyone who is interested enough to try.

The one salient point in the article is that Amazon is not paying enough attention to privacy concerns. Amazon doesn’t offer any real privacy settings, and even allows a search by email address. If you’re going to be verifying someone’s “real name”, you should probably give them some protection.

By: tired of blogs

tired of blogs — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 00:05:21 +0000

A trick for Amazon: don’t use the public wish list. Instead, put stuff in your cart, then go to your cart and click “save for later.” The “save for later” list can be of unlimited length. Also, every time you go to your cart, it will tell you if the prices of any items in your list have changed, so you can tell quickly when something has gone or sale or remainder.

By: Quo Vadis

Quo Vadis — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 21:02:40 +0000

I learned early on to be careful about the tracks I leave on the Internet. That’s why I don’t post under my own name (not that it would mean anything to anyone here). I was around before the Web when Usenet news was a major part of the Internet experience. We thought that everything we posted disappeared after a week or so when it spooled off the last server’s disk (disk space was expensive then). I discovered later and to my horror that someone had been archiving everything on Usenet and pressing CDs of it and that Google had bought a complete set and was making it all available through Google Groups. Every rant, lame joke and intentional provocation I ever posted is now available for anyone to read, all devoid of original context.

By: Brock

Brock — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 20:08:20 +0000

sek,

Just register at Rapleaf, and you can mark everything in your profile “private”.

By: More about Rapleaf « Debris

More about Rapleaf « Debris — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 19:25:39 +0000

[...] to Crooked Timber for the [...]

By: eric

eric — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 19:23:19 +0000

How timely. I had a bad experience with Rapleaf just yesterday. I was curious about the site, and trying to see how it worked. I recklessly input my email address book, mistakenly thinking the site would merely tell me who among my contacts was listed. To my horror and embarrassment, what it actually did was send every single person in my address book an email saying I’d rated them as a “good person” and asking them to rate me in return. Fortunately, I discovered this gaffe promptly, and sent an apologetic message to all the folks I’d inadvertently annoyed.

Admittedly, it was largely my fault for not reading the directions more carefully. But, it might be nice if they’d given a warning or something.

By: KCinDC

KCinDC — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 19:03:06 +0000

ZoomInfo.com has at least six separate profiles for me (along with a dozen or so others of a few people with the same name) that are full of bad affiliations and other errors. I notice them from time to time but never felt the need to claim them.