Truly. Deeply. Madly

http://www.newsweek.com/id/96366

"The site in question is Spokeo (spokeo.com), which promises that it"finds your friends' blogs and photos that you never knew about, guaranteed" and "tracks your friends' new content, so you don't have to visit their Websites one by one." What this means is that when you sign up for Spokeo, it uses the addresses from your Web-based e-mail accounts to create a list of "friends"—which, in practice, is just about anyone you've e-mailed. Then it proceeds to scan 36 popular sites with social features, pulling together everything your friends have posted into a single, easy-to-read format. All tidbits are fair game:LiveJournal blog posts, YouTube videos, even Amazon wish lists. Most disturbingly, Spokeo never notifies your contacts that you're watching them.

Stalktastic! Yey for creepy, invasive privacy-rape!
Yey for people with only the most casual contact with you being able to use your email address to find, say, your secret, known only to a tiny, trusted few journal! Yey for your BOSS being able to find anything you haven't marked private, even if nobody tells him the name of your journal at all! Yey for your grandmother finding your naughty drawings, which you've put under a warning, but the rss feed can still get to, because you didn't lock them! Yey for your ex getting all the details on your first date with the new lover, even if you've changed your journal name, and banned him from the old one... yeah, that'll be fun, won't it?

Now I know, this one's not squarely on LJ's head, however; can such data really be mined by a second party user without LJ's having agreed to it and opened the back door? That is a legitimate question, because I? Artist/writer/creative type, and not so much with the computer structures and database architecture. If it's do-able without LJ's say so, it's STILL creepy as all get out though, and I don't like it even one tiny little smidgen.

So there's a fix for it, apparently. This info, I got from mynn's IJ account, in this post here, and have implemented it on my LJ already. (Edit: that post is friends locked. Sorry for the inconvenience.)

1. While logged in as your account, go to the admin console here:

http://www.livejournal.com/admin/console/


Minimize what is sent "out" via feed by entering this into the console and clicking execute:

set synlevel title

Then only the title of your posts are sent to her reader, and she has to log into LJ to read the post and "save it" manually if she wants to.

As I said above, I've already done this in my LJ. Now I need to have a look at IJ and see whether I need to do something similar over there. Because my LJ invites people into certain aspects of my life, NOT into my underwear drawer, damn it!

EDIT: Yes, you DO have to make the same change on InsaneJournal. To get to the admin console, go here: http://www.insanejournal.com/admin/console/ and paste the same code as the above into the field before hitting 'execute'.