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Comment by VMG | Hacker News Reader

> I ran his e-mail address through a reverse e-mail finder, which cost me about 15 bucks for a month's worth of "surveillance."

Can anyone enlighten me on what she means?

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There are a number of paid services on the net where you give them an email address and they slurp up all the information out there associated with that person.

http://www.spokeo.com is one of many and might be the one used in the article, though Spokeo gives you 3 months for your $15.

How do they find out what you've used your email address for? Do they buy that info from the websites?

I don't know anything about Spokeo, but Rapleaf uses the APIs of various services, and when that isn't enough, they screen scrape.

> Rapleaf uses the APIs of various services

Those APIs expose people's email addresses?

Yes. If you already know someone's email address, you can get all sorts of information about them from twitter, fB, amazon wishlists...anything where the user's account is keyed to an email address.

So... isn't there something in user agreements that avoids this sort of thing? Maybe I should read it closer, but I would expect "will not sell my email address to third parties" would be a common clause. And if it wasn't, I'd expect some sort of consumer backlash.

Sorry for the line of questions, this is sortof a jolt to my view of reality.

They aren't selling the email address to third parties - they are letting them access the information for free.

Rapleaf.com offers similar services. With just an email address you can find "Demographics, Influence, Interests, Social media memberships, Occupation, and much more."[1]

[1]: http://www.rapleaf.com/developers/api_overview

Even more of a reason to use disposable email addresses.

Google would own if they popped out a product like this. Of course that would never happen because then Google would then be admitting to what we all already know.

...that they store your information in order to be able to advertise to you better? This doesn't need admitting to.

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