Comments on: At Rapleaf, your personals are public

The start-up aggregates social-networking profiles and, through TrustFuse, opens the possibility of selling that data to marketers.

[dargon19888]

Avoid at all costs...

So essentially this site is one half of the equation.

That is, they say thay they will grab any and all data about you that they can. *BUT* THEY WON'T reveal your *E-MAIL* address to a prospective client.

THATS BECAUSE THEIR PROSPECTIVE CLIENT HAS ALREADY COMPILED A LIST OF E-MAIL ADDRESSES FROM WHATEVER MEANS AND THEN MATCHES THEM TO THIS DATABASE.

So Rapleaf doesn't spam. But their customers can now send a more targeted spam message.

Anyone who uses Rapleaf deserves what they get. More spam.

Its still spam, regardless of how "targeted" they attempt to limit the message. Think about it.

[dondarko]

privacy laws?

this has to break some privacy laws and if it doesn't then we don't have any privacy guarantees with existing laws. simple as that.

[dargon19888]

Nope doesn't break any privacy laws...

When you sign up for this "service" you acknowledge their ToS and privacy statement.

If they tell you up front that they are going to collect any and all information from you and then sell it (sans e-mail addresses) to third party marketers, you're essentially SOL.

You gave up your rights to any privacy that they capture on their site.

Now you know why I suggest that you avoid this site or any other site like this at all costs.

[powella]

So you sign up for a social networking site, use your personal email address, thus allow other users to find you via email address to see your profile and you think this is private? If you are so concerned then maybe you should complain to MySpace or not use social sites. Some social sites let you lock your information to varying degrees. You really have to pay attention to what their privacy policies are (you could even use different email addresses for home, business, spam use, etc). I think we are all naive if you think RapLeaf is the only company doing this. Collecting publicly available data is the job of every marketing firm. Just because the publicly admit and even let you see what data they have collected this makes it worse?

[asharpe2]

Just reviewed Rapleaf's policies and based on my understanding, two things come to mind:

1) dargon19888 is right about what rapleaf does -- they have a database of emails that companies can match and see if you have public profiles on social sites. After calling in to rapleaf, although no specific companies were mentioned, found out that companies like drugstores, electronic goods stores -- any one who you might have made a purchase from -- have large email databases that they don't know. these companies already communicate with you via email, and they don't spam you more just because they know you're on facebook...

2) re: privacy laws, if you read rapleaf's policies, sounds like they follow privacy policies of the social networks themselves. not sure how they do that, but since they only find PUBLIC data on people, they can't be hacking the system.

final thoughts: if you don't want your info found by the companies you buy from, DON'T MAKE YOUR PROFILES PUBLIC ON SOCIAL NETWORKS. if it's public, anyone can see it and you give up rights to it (even though your info online already belongs to sites like myspace, facebook, etc). if you make it private, no one can see it besides ur friends.

side note: another point i picked up from talking with rapleaf is that if you have a lot of friends and are a big fan of a company, you're more likely to special offers/promotions from companies because you have more influence :)

see? it's not all bad