The Spokeo Perspective

So you’ve reached 500 friends on Facebook. Congratulations!  Too bad that having Facebook "friends" isn’t the same as having real friends, right? Wrong! At least according to a new study from the Pew Research Center. The D.C.-based think tank surveyed 2,225 US adults on their internet usage, social networking habits and social life, and found [...]

As mentioned in our previous blog, Spokeo has been a sizzling hot news topic recently. I’m sure you’ve all seen the warning messages about Spokeo that you’re supposed to repost to your friends on your Facebook and Twitter accounts, or heard about Spokeo from your local news stations. To help clear up any confusion and [...]

2011 is here, and we would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year! 2010 has been a breakout year for Spokeo. In February 2010, we launched the groundbreaking Spokeo 4.0 with the new name search and reverse phone lookup technologies. In April and May 2010, we landed onto all the mainstream newspapers, magazines, TV [...]

The holidays are all about being giving, thankful, and most importantly, spending time with your loved ones. Do you have a family member, friend, or other loved one that you’ve lost touch with, or possibly never even met? Try using Spokeo to perform a people search on your special someone during this holiday season. Searching [...]

"Jaron Zepel Lanier (born May 3, 1960) pronounced /ˈdʒɛrɨn lɨˈnir/ is an American computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author. He made an experimental film in the past, but does not consider himself a filmmaker. In the early 1980s he popularized the term "Virtual Reality" (VR) for a field in which he was a pioneer. [...]

Today a new reality is slowly emerging which could hardly be anticipated when Spokeo first began.  All of us – innovators and users alike – are slowly becoming aware that aggregating multiple public profiles and consolidating them into one seems to give birth to yet a whole new identity heretofore unrecognized. This is, in essence, [...]

Upon the release of Spokeo 4 in early March of this year, a surprising controversy sprang up among the blog communities and media. Our new product unexpectedly seemed to strike a nerve in some, eliciting powerful and sometimes harsh responses. Suddenly we were the focus of overwhelming attention. There was much misplaced trepidation, and startling [...]

For those of you who may not have heard, The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) – a non-profit public interest group that, interestingly, bills itself as “working to keep the Internet open, innovative, and free”– filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week, alleging that Spokeo’s practices violate the Fair Credit [...]

When we use Google Maps, we can see our own house, but we probably don’t mind that other people can see it, too.  When we flip through a Whitepages directory, we can find people’s phone numbers and addresses, are we are fine with it since Whitepages directories have been delivered to our homes for decades.  [...]

As most of you would agree, the Web 2.0 era is long over.  Web 2.0 was categorized by ad-based business models.  Everything has to be free, and advertisers would somehow pay the bills.  We entrepreneurs chased after user counts, and the ad dollars were assumed to flow in. We started Spokeo with the standard "Google [...]