Somebody is Watching You

So I got this ominous email this morning:

As a courtesy, we are notifying you that Spokeo users have found the following accounts for you:

(username) on Flickr
(username) on Picasa

If you would like to make these accounts private, please
change the privacy settings on the original network and
Spokeo will update its search results to reflect your changes.

So first I googled Spokeo to know what I was dealing with. Once I was convinced that it is a legitimate website, I signed up for it to find out really what it was all about. SCARY.

After Spokeo took a look at all the email addresses in my contact list it told me exactly what my friends had added to the shopping cart at Amazon, what pictures they've added to Picasa and Flickr, what profile updates they had made to Friendster and My Space, and what new radio stations they've added to Pandora.

The problem is that this information is accessible to ANYONE who's address happened to be in my contact list. People I had only emailed once or twice. People I would rather not remember. And this of course means the reverse could be true. People who happen to have my email address from various places could see my blog entries and look at my pictures. This is not good.

If this information were only accessible to my good friends, I would love for them to be able to check out what I've been up to, and share with them my photos and profiles, but the general population need not be browsing my Amazon shopping cart. So sorry all you Spokeo users, I'm going to change my privacy settings on my accounts for Pandora, Amazon, Flixr, Picasa, etc so that they are unsearchable and I will no longer be visable on Spokeo.