Here is a social networking site that collects your personal information and sells it to direct marketers. Now they do not violate their privacy statement as they do not sell your email to the marketers. Rather the marketers come to them with emails they have already collected. Then Trustfuese sells the marketers the information that their business partner, Rapleaf, has collected on the emails. As ZDNet wrote in At Rapleaf, your personals are public.
“In other words, Rapleaf sweeps up all the publicly available but sometimes hard-to-get information it can find about you on the Web, via social networks, other sites and, soon to be added, blogs. At the other end of the business, TrustFuse packages information culled from sites in a profile and sells the profile to marketers. All three companies appear to operate within the scope of their stated privacy policies, which say they do "not sell, rent or lease e-mail addresses to third parties."
Rapleaf describes itself as an online reputation lookup service. Here is a service to avoid. It provides “a people search engine that lets you retrieve the name, age and social-network affiliations of anyone, as long as you have his or her e-mail address.” Her is another example of the dark side of the openness of the new web. Thanks to Valdis Krebs for alerting me to this problem. I have been approached by a number of new business social networking services. For now I am sticking with Facebook, even though their real founder remains a litigation issue.
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