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Last week millions of people found an email saying, "Someone researched your reputation on Rapleaf," in their inbox. The email bragged,
Even though your profile is incomplete, the person who searched you found some basic reputational information on you. At Rapleaf, you can find such information as age, location, history, social network links, and more on over 60 million people.
It then invited you to claim your Rapleaf profile and add more information to it.
This piqued the interest of BlogHer founder Lisa Stone, who tipped me about the topic. It seems it piqued the interest of ZDNet, too. They did a bit of investigating and found,
In the cozy Facebook social network, it's easy to have a sense of privacy among friends and business acquaintances.
But sites like Rapleaf will quickly jar you awake: Everything you say or do on a social network could be fair game to sell to marketers.
Rapleaf, based in San Francisco, is building a business on that premise. The privately held start-up, whose investors include Facebook-backer and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, runs two consumer Web sites: Rapleaf.com, 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; and Upscoop.com, a similar site to discover, en masse, which social networks to which the people in your contact list belong. To use Upscoop, you must first give the site the username and password of your e-mail account at Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo or AOL.
By collecting these e-mail addresses, Rapleaf has already amassed a database of 50 million profiles, which might include a person's age, birth date, physical address, alma mater, friends, favorite books and music, political affiliations, as well as how long that person has been online, which social networks he frequents, and what applications he's downloaded.
All of this information could come in handy for Rapleaf's third business, TrustFuse, which sells data (but not e-mail addresses) to marketers so they can better target customers, according to TrustFuse's Web site. As of Friday afternoon, the sites of Rapleaf and Upscoop had no visible link to TrustFuse, but TrustFuse's privacy policy mentions that the two companies are wholly owned subsidiaries of TrustFuse
This revelation threw Rapleaf into a frenzy of apology about how wrong, wrong, wrong they were. They want to be forgiven and have an opt-out provision to prove it. Quite a few bloggers are willing to forgive, and they are linked to at the end of Rapleaf's apology.
But all bloggers were not so fast to forgive. Critical comments from the blogosphere include Rachel's from the Liminal Librarian, who said,
There's a big difference between this automatic notification business and the way a more professional service like LinkedIn handles things
A couple of European bloggers commented that they thought the uplifting of a person's entire address book and the publishing of their information without their consent was illegal in Europe. At Some more Rapleaf concern, blogger n0comment tells what happened when he tried to get removed from Rapleaf and that the information remained on Upscoop in spite of his efforts. He also specifically names the European law he thinks applies to the situation.
Nathalie, in Belgium, in her post WTF!! Watch out for Rapleaf, said
I was wondering could I go to the police and serve a complaint against Rapleaf?
This is a serious violation to the Privacy laws. (at least here in Belgium, and I'm pretty sure it counts for the European Union as well).
At Jane Porter, the comment was,
Rapleaf on the other hand, is searching the private, more personal social networks - a little bit different I’d say. One site is made to help business people do background checks or help sales people define the org charts (perhaps that’s painting too rosy of a picture) while the other one finds a lot more private information (i.e. meant for friends) of a person and sells it to anyone. Does this mean that even though you have limited settings on your facebook, Rapleaf can find you?
Another thing, who exactly are they selling this information to? We’re in a whole different ballgame when we take info from networks that consist of many young grade schoolers. Creepy.
The guys at Radcliffe claim that they’re “the only email-based reputation system”. In some respect I see where they’re coming from…but spammers etc. aren’t necessarily going to put those addresses on social networks.
However, just tried my [email address]. Nothing on me pops up - but there’s this message: 'Hey,
