"The Spokeo process begins with providing your address book; your name and password at social-networking sites; or the URL of your friends' profile, photo album, website, or blog."
There's no new privacy intrusion going on here. This service is simply an aggregator for data you could find on your own with a little effort. If anything, this will help people to think twice about what information they're making available on all the services it aggregates.
Even if they store the passwords as MD5 hashes the system is still extremely vulnerable because of MD5 hash google searches as detailed a while back. Besides, the whole system is hub for potentially thousands of users passwords, and that would worry me a little.
I supposed it'd use it instead of yahoo pipes or other mashup services - giving it lists of my friends' myspace pages and looking for new comments for example - but I would never give it my passwords.
I think for most people, someone else having their social networking passwords would be mere annoyance, so if any product were at all compelling, they'd have no trouble giving them up. I know that's the case for me. It wouldn't be anywhere close to them getting my email or online banking passwords. The worst they could do is leave obscene comments on my friends' walls.
That said, this product doesn't seem very useful, and I wouldn't expect it to catch on.
Probably a hit. Most people outside our paranoid (hacker) demographic don't seem to care much about online privacy, so long as it doesn't involve them losing money.
OMG !