[HN Gopher] Creeping as a Service
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Creeping as a Service
Author : dshipper
Score : 178 points
Date : 2021-02-09 19:45 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (every.to)
(TXT) w3m dump (every.to)
| transitivebs wrote:
| Def reminds me of https://www.flock.network as well
| smit2300 wrote:
| The content here is definitely a useful meditation on what
| people's core ideals are over time, but I think it paints a
| really shallow image of human beings. Of course people's Twitter
| bios change over time, they're a roughly 25-word blurb, not a
| perfect representation of the individual running the account.
| People are allowed to feel some topics need more limelight than
| others at certain times of history, that doesn't mean they're
| some horrible vulture using the cause for personal gain. Just
| because you take Bernie2020 or BlackLivesMatter out of your
| Twitter bio doesn't mean you stop caring about those things, it
| just means you changed your Twitter bio.
| AlphaWeaver wrote:
| If you want to use this service without signing up, you can
| browse someone's profile directly at
| https://spoonbill.io/data/<username>
| dylan604 wrote:
| is this by design, or just lazy coding?
| gfody wrote:
| facilitating crass creeping as a service where one monitors
| spoonbill for removal requests for the really interesting stuff
| jameslk wrote:
| I've been wondering when something like this would be made. I've
| felt that it would be even more disgusting to track changes on
| LinkedIn profiles (imagine these changes being purchased by
| companies where you're interviewing).
|
| Unfortunately the web is open and there's nothing really to stop
| it, sans regulations and trust that they will be enforced. Once
| your life is on the internet you might as well assume everything
| you say or do is being tracked in some version control repository
| for humans.
| technick wrote:
| I did a vendor review last year for a SaaS which tracks the
| changes of your employees linkedin profiles (they also
| partnered with monster and a few other job boards). The service
| is used by HR departments to measure employee happiness and
| risk rate which person is looking.
| recursive wrote:
| How is this disgusting? I'm pretty out of the loop with social
| media. But I'm assuming the major networks have the concept of
| a "private" profile. And I assume that such profiles wouldn't
| be available on this service.
|
| If I'm wrong about the existence of private profiles, then the
| problem isn't this service. The problem would be publishing
| information publicly that they wish to remain private.
| McMini wrote:
| If they track 10,000,000 accounts, does this mean they make
| millions of request towards Twitter every minute? Isn't that
| against Twitters terms?
| codetrotter wrote:
| They might be paying Twitter for enterprise API access.
|
| https://developer.twitter.com/en/products/twitter-api/enterp...
| vincentmarle wrote:
| I'm not seeing anything about pricing. How do they make
| money?
| filoleg wrote:
| > I'm not seeing anything about pricing. How do they make
| money?
|
| Right next to the "Apply for enterprise access" button,
| there is a giant block of text saying "Our enterprise
| solutions are customized with predictable pricing".
|
| Basically, they make money, because that API access isn't
| free. They don't list the actual price there because, as it
| is the case with most enterprise sales, there is no fixed
| pricing, and they work out individual deals on a case-by-
| case basis (which is based on the number of requests you
| expect your API to make per day/hour, volume discounts,
| long-term contract discounts, etc.).
|
| Long story short, there is a price on it, but to find out
| what it is, you will have to apply. And the price you will
| get will probably not be representative of the price other
| people/enterprises get, but at least you will know what it
| will cost for your specific company/project.
| dvt wrote:
| I wouldn't really call tracking public biography diffs "creeping"
| though. Either way, this may be interesting, but is there an
| actual viable business here?
|
| Would anyone _pay_ to see this information tracked? Maybe
| journalists?
| spongechameleon wrote:
| While this made me feel creeped out at first, that "metadata" all
| seems like the public information that we intend to share when we
| signup for a service like Twitter.
| remram wrote:
| Basic but important things such as renames don't even show
| up...
| detaro wrote:
| Systematic collection and archiving of "metadata" is not the
| same as data being available at some point in time. (It's
| really the same as the arguments against other automated
| surveillance: it's "public metadata" where your car is on
| public roads, but a country-wide database based on automated
| scans is still different than the fact that someone can follow
| you around manually)
| egypturnash wrote:
| Damn this sure is about a level of Giving A Fuck About Twitter
| than I have never achieved in the thirteen years I've been on
| Twitter. Like, I just looked at the data Spoonbill has on my
| account and it's just a set of "egypturnash changed their
| website/bio/location" entries in mid-May 2020, which is when I
| assume this site first decided to look at my profile.
|
| Also this sure is a stealth ad and a half for Spoonbill.
| kyleblarson wrote:
| Every time I learn about stuff like this I'm glad that I left the
| toxic cesspool that is social media years ago. (Of course I don't
| include HN in this category.)
| SCUSKU wrote:
| I am with you there. Sometimes though I wish HN'ers were a
| little more compassionate to their fellow hackers. I suppose
| everything can't be perfect though.
| kreeben wrote:
| >> though I wish HN'ers were a little more compassionate to
| their fellow hackers
|
| The reason why HN'ers are not always kind to other HN'ers is,
| because HN is nothing more and nothing less than social
| media, albeit at its finest.
| rl3 wrote:
| In the past I've theorized people do this for HN comments to
| track edits.
|
| As a serial _edit-until-finally-satisfied_ poster, I suppose it
| 's nice to know that those edits are taking up terabytes of data
| in such systems. :)
| bartread wrote:
| Back in 2013, at the intersection of peak .ly domain usage, crazy
| amounts of information available through Facebook's graph APIs
| (as well as other social networks), widespread GPS-equipped
| smartphone usage, and free and open APIs literally everywhere
| (including Google maps), along with my own re-education as a
| then-modern web developer after years of mostly desktop app
| development, I realised it would be possible to plot the
| movements of anyone you "knew" online within a pretty good margin
| of error in most cases using their social media updates.
|
| _As a joke_ - let me emphasise: _AS A JOKE_ (we 'll get to this
| in a minute) - I seriously considered (aware of the irony)
| registering stalk.ly as a domain name with Libyan Spider and
| using it to host a site that billed itself as an online private
| investigation agency with the tagline, "We'll find out what you
| need to know... for a price." The whole thing was overall going
| to look as shady as reasonably possible.
|
| You'd be able to find out exactly what you'd been up to and where
| you'd been based on your social media posts, with a timeline, map
| view, etc. There'd be a sign-up option that would offer you the
| ability to do the same for your "friends".
|
| Worried your partner has been having an affair? No problem: slap
| their profile URL in here and we'll tell you exactly what they've
| been up to and where they've been up to it, etc. Want to know
| what your kids or employees have been up to? We've got that
| covered too. Oh yeah.
|
| The point was to highlight how much oversharing most of us do
| online, and how unaware we all often are of how much information
| about our lives we're really giving away. Also I was more than a
| bit curious about how many people would actually try to sign up,
| and I thought it might be funny.
|
| Fortunately (I think, although I still wonder sometimes) my
| tendency to laziness kicked in and I never actually implemented
| it. I was also a bit concerned about the possibility of
| unintended consequences that could be personally detrimental. I
| have no doubt Facebook et all would have gone ber-effin-zerk once
| they'd spotted the app, but that wasn't my major concern - I was
| more worried about the reaction of friends, and my employer, if
| by some chance it had gained some traction.
|
| The ideal outcome would have been for it to provide a certain
| amount of entertainment for a while, and possibly drawn some
| small attention to issues of privacy that - prior to that point -
| had very much been minority concerns. Still, I was quite worried
| about it backfiring.
| muttled wrote:
| The real plot twist would be if you send a message to the user
| they were stalking letting them know who made the attempt.
| bartread wrote:
| Absolute genius. That would have been incredible. It would
| also have caused the most incredible shitstorm.
|
| Maybe let them check, offer a redacted or
| scrambled/fictionalised history, and then let their target
| know a week or two later.
|
| Otherwise I think it would have been shut down really
| quickly. You really want the thing to build up a head of
| steam before the sky falls if at all possible.
| [deleted]
| joncp wrote:
| Information wants to be free. If you post information in a public
| forum then that information can take on a life of its own. I'm
| just surprised that people are surprised by that.
| balls187 wrote:
| Not really related, but Budgie Smuggler is the Australian common
| name for men's speedo like swimwear. The name is derived from the
| fact that the look of a man's privates while wearing the swim
| wear appears as if the man is hiding (smuggling) a small bird (a
| budgie) down his pants.
|
| Hence, Budgie Smuggler.
| tobias2014 wrote:
| Is archive.org then also creeping as a service?
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| > Social apps have made creepers out of all of us.
|
| Back in the AOL Instant Messenger days of the early 2000's there
| was a service like this that tracked users' "Away Messages".
| People definitely tweaked those repeatedly as well :)
| gumby wrote:
| Who cares? I don't mean "who cares about this article"; I found
| it worth the read. What I really mean is: is there really that
| much interest, or even that much _of_ interest, in the edits of
| peoples ' autobiographical sound bites?
|
| We "learn" that Elon Musk is indeed self-centered and image-
| obsessed. Big deal, I'm sure he hopes that you think so, and you
| already knew so before reading this. Anyone whose net worth is
| tied to their public image and fandom is almost certainly the
| same. It's also not clear how much of those changes are actually
| his personality and how much are simply consistent with his
| public persona. A delta between the two would be interesting but
| almost by definition impossible to determine from this info.
|
| Don't get me wrong: I'm sure there is a fascinating PhD or two to
| be found in this info. But for any ordinary person (including
| journalists or TMZ employee) are there any real, insightful
| nuggets in what is explicitly the process of curation?
| detaro wrote:
| It's "awesome" to make sure that if someone ever had something
| in there that's now embarrassing or wrong you can taunt them
| with it without having to have stalked them yourself. Stalker
| paradise.
| gumby wrote:
| Sigh. This is indeed an example of someone who would care.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| > We "learn" that Elon Musk is indeed self-centered and image-
| obsessed.
|
| It's an untestable hypothesis, but I've always wondered if
| anyone would care about Elon Musk if he never got hairplugs.
|
| https://pagesix.com/2018/07/25/its-highly-likely-elon-musk-s...
|
| I just can't imagine him developing a cult personality without
| it. I think people would think of him more like Ballmer - just
| kinda crazy.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Yeah, cuz nobody cares about Bezos
| SkyBelow wrote:
| HR seems to, and that alone is enough to cause massive
| disruption for most people, even the 'relatively well off'. If
| you aren't rich enough to never need to work again to survive,
| then your livelihood is one Twitter mob away from being
| destroyed.
| kall wrote:
| Spoonbill updates are neat when people use twitter bios as a
| mini resume, like a linkedin feed of sorts. That way you can
| see who left facebook this week.
| Swizec wrote:
| People care. As evidence I present the entire yellow
| journalism, reality show, and influencer industry.
|
| There's an entire meme economy built on top of things like the
| batchelor. None of those people are even noteworthy.
|
| People really really care.
| gumby wrote:
| I understand that many people are interested in celebrity.
| (That's why I included people like "TMZ employee" as
| "ordinary people").
|
| I really meant the ephemera of autographical edits. It seemed
| as relevant as collecting used cocktail napkins of
| celebrities.
|
| A parallel comment to yours suggests its fodder for "gotcha"
| posts. I guess that makes sense for those who like that, so
| does answer, a little, my "who cares" question.
| Debug_Overload wrote:
| Stuff like this makes our online presence very creepy. More than
| I personally used to think anyway. Even on platforms where people
| usually think of their accounts as "throwaway" or "anonymous".
|
| Take Reddit. Besides the well-known archive sites that keep
| removed/deleted _content_ (removeddit, ceddit, etc), there is
| this cool service (pushshift) that offers all that and more. One
| interesting and relevant feature of this tool is the ability to
| look up all content by a specific author /username. You just put
| the name there, and lo and behold, everything this person ever
| posted is right there; even if it's deleted, or removed.
|
| If you do a quick test using this tool, you'll soon see the
| amount of people who thought their deleted content couldn't be
| tied back to them, continuing to use their usernames like nothing
| happened. The deleted content can sometimes be incredibly
| sensitive information that the person posted by mistake (or when
| looking for advice, having a rant about something, etc). It
| sometimes includes very specific details that may uniquely
| identify a person. And most users aren't aware of any of this.
| And it's available even if you delete your account. Someone just
| has to know that you used this username once upon a time.
|
| The tool eventually removed this option from the UI (but it's
| still available through their API). The thread where this removal
| was announced is interesting and reveals how useful this tool was
| to some users on Reddit for combating spam/harassment (or even to
| find their own content), but nevertheless this dark side of it is
| there. As you might expect, someone slapped a new UI on that very
| tool, and that feature is readily available today, few google
| searches away.
|
| When I saw this tool, it really reminded me of that. It's
| incredible how our online activities became permanent, no matter
| how much we try to erase the parts we don't like (or don't want
| to be public).
| beauzero wrote:
| "Retroactive prosecution" are words that I tell my daughters
| all the time. Do NOT put your opinions online...period. You
| have no idea what will be illegal in 30 years and if you were
| for or against it.
| bikeshaving wrote:
| For Americans, if it were legal for you to post something
| today, your actions are legally protected thanks to Article
| 1, Section 9, Clause 3 of the Constitution, which prevents
| "ex post facto" laws, or laws which retroactively change the
| legal consequences of past actions.
|
| Most countries have some version of this protection, so your
| legal advice to your daughters is probably incorrect.
| aranelsurion wrote:
| While this is technically correct from legal standpoint,
| the kernel of truth is in there. (Il)legality doesn't
| matter much compared to consequences. Consequences matter a
| lot, and in that case his advice is perfectly sound.
|
| That one "joke" you made when you were sixteen might render
| you unemployable by 2040. People evolve, and their earlier
| marks on earth vanish. Before social media even the worst
| could re-make themselves into something better, now even
| the best have their worst moments permanently recorded.
| interviewer0000 wrote:
| Not if your families beliefs are outdated or otherwise
| bigoted. My older family members are racist. I harbored
| racist beliefs, and told plenty of racist jokes as a boy.
| My "opinions", I posted on twitter, as a teenager, would be
| more than enough to get me expelled from society today. Be
| it culturally cancelled in the US, or imprisoned in the UK.
|
| Not everyone is raised by good people. Thankfully I had a
| seismic event (Perma banned from a favorite game after
| sinking 1000s of hours for being offensive) correct my
| behavior. I thank my lucky stars it was merely me being
| banned from a video game that caused me to reconsider how I
| act, and not something much more serious.
| beauzero wrote:
| Different perspective. It's not legal advice. It's read
| history advice...when governments change people generally
| go to prison or worse for things that were legal under the
| previous government. Since data is mobile and global there
| is good chance that if a government goes away the data
| won't.
| torwayburger wrote:
| I'm thinking McCarthyism as an example makes it good advice
| either way.
| ISO-morphism wrote:
| I think gp may be going for "persecution" rather than
| "prosecution", i.e. jury of public opinion rather than jury
| in a courtroom.
| offtop5 wrote:
| Tools like this are why I stopped using Reddit ( aside from
| talking about programming). And I assume anything I post here
| may eventually be traced back to me.
|
| Even if you do change your username regularly, your patterns of
| speech may stay rather similar. And no matter what you say, the
| context around it may change in 30 years or so.
|
| This new generation loves to screenshot personal conversations
| and then post them to Reddit for brownie points. Meaning if you
| get involved with someone who's slightly malicious, they can
| easily ruin your life too.
|
| At this point I'm very careful to only meet folks in person.
| It's not unheard of for people to share compromising details
| about themselves, only to become extortion victims.
| dangus wrote:
| Everything you're saying is true, and from a privacy
| standpoint it is quite scary.
|
| However, there's a really easy way to not worry about this:
| don't be mean/rude to other people publicly, and think about
| what you say before writing it down.
|
| It's also hard to be "compromised" if you really own who you
| are. Embarrassing things about yourself are only embarrassing
| if you're embarrassed about them.
|
| Obviously, people have interests and fetishes they'd rather
| not be made public. Maybe they'd like to interact with those
| communities online and remain anonymous. I don't have an easy
| answer for that - an alt account might not be enough.
|
| Still, for many social media sites it really is in some ways
| the same standard as written letters. Don't write things that
| you're worried about being read and attributed to you in the
| future.
|
| Security by obscurity many apply: if in 2050 everyone
| everyone has 30-40 years of social media data under their
| belt, it strikes my as unlikely that anybody's going to care
| about the one thing you said 30 years ago, a needle in quite
| an enormous haystack.
|
| After all, you aren't a historical figure.
| ishjoh wrote:
| I would really caution against thinking this way. Parent
| discusses changing contexts which is exactly right. Things
| said in polite society 30 years ago are no longer
| acceptable, there is no reason to think that what we say
| today in polite society will be acceptable in 30 years
| time. The thing is even though everyone will have skeletons
| in their closet that doesn't act as some sort of defense,
| it will only take the right kind of persistence by someone
| strongly motivated to blow up your life, it doesn't matter
| that much that they have skeletons.
|
| It also seems to be very asymmetric, in that the ones most
| likely to attack are the ones with the least history. It's
| an asymmetric tool younger folks can use against older
| folks, and that asymmetry will always exist.
| offtop5 wrote:
| To each their own, you can only control what you say, not
| how it's interpreted.
|
| Plus I really think people should be able to mature, just
| because you said something really mean when you were 19,
| doesn't mean at 39 you're a horrible person. In fact just
| because you said something really mean at 19, doesn't mean
| you're a horrible person at 19. But instead of it being a
| one-off comment at a party, it's now a part of you. I
| really think this is why so many young adults get so
| stressed out over social media, you constantly need to
| create this artificial image of some superhuman who's
| living a fantastic amazing life. Any misstep you'll lose
| fans,followers, etc. This makes so many people so
| miserable.
|
| I know I became much happier after I got rid of my social
| media, but again to each their own.
| Clewza313 wrote:
| "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most
| honest of men, I will find something in them which will
| hang him." -Cardinal Richelieu (supposedly)
|
| Your view seems quite naive to me. Not only do times
| change, with previously acceptable things becoming
| unspeakable (eg. "retarded", "transsexual",
| "transvestite"), but with taking out of context and
| selective quoting you can distort the meaning of almost
| anything.
| simplestman wrote:
| This is one reason that I create new account on each service
| every few months or until my cookies expire. I never remember
| or save passwords.
| [deleted]
| jcun4128 wrote:
| man... stuff like this makes me glad I'm more socially/internet
| aware than I was before
|
| breadcrumbs
| baxtr wrote:
| Seems like they don't have any European accounts? Probably
| because they don't want to deal with the GDPR issues?
|
| PS: I only checked a couple or so.
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(page generated 2021-02-09 23:00 UTC)