Phil sez, "Spoke.com has sucked 3 million records (in 6 months) out of the Outlook address books of your friends and is selling them on their website."
Spoke says that it launched it's free service in August and that they have added 3 million new names since August. How did they do that? It was easy! To get access to Spoke's "free" service, you must install the Spoke toolbar. The Spoke toolbar then copies all of the information from your address book into the Spoke database. It's at this point you should be able to smell the burning sulfur.They've got unlisted numbers, private addresses, cell-phone numbers and so forth. These people are complete scum. Link (Thanks, Phil!)If, for example, I pressed the button for Spoke's free service, the Spoke toolbar would install and then copy the roughly 2100 names, phone numbers, and email addresses out of my Outlook Contact database and then add them to Spoke's database. Spoke would then be able to sell those names, titles, companies, addresses, and email addresses to direct marketing organizations. Participating in this scheme is a sure path to hell.
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Just a bit of a correction: at Spoke all we do is check people's names and job titles to verify that the information we have already gathered from public sources is accurate. Any information that someone chooses to upload is theirs and theirs alone to use. We do not publish anyone's phone number or email address or physical address. Go look it up. Check out the information on your profile. It will have the corporate HQ address and the main number for your company. If this isn't true, please please call me a liar. Shout it. Post it. We deserve nothing less.
Wow, has this been a strange 4 days. I've called and called and could not get a live human being on the phone. So I finally said to myself, Self, what the hell... I'll use Spoke for its intended purpose. No since in me COLD CALLING! I needed A NAME! A PERSON! A CONTACT to get my foot in the door. So I searched for people who worked at Spoke and came across a guy named Frank Vaculin, who was the CEO. Impressive! Go Frank, go! I dialed into spoke's main number at 650-403-5900 and used their directory service (#) to search for his ext. 650-403-5984 got me in touch with Frank, who I like to call Frankie. Frankie wasn't too eager to help me. He kept insisting that I give him my full name, employer, and phone number for someone to call me back later. After a few minutes on the phone, using my southern charm (kidding), I said "you mean to tell me you don't have any representives working in this place right now? I'm starting to think this isn't a real company. Whats going on?" He had a friendly chuckle and asked if I'd hold, he'd get someone. At this point, a lady introducing herself as Kathy Frankland came to my rescue. Kathy is pretty impressive too, shes a CFO. I don't know the difference between a CEO and a CFO, but at any rate, she said she'd take care of it personally and I could call her back at 650-403-5985 if I had any questions. She only took down my name and the company (my college, how the hell did they even get that?) that appeared on the website. Since there was only one profile listed on Spoke with my info on it, she assured me it would be easy to find. She didn't even demand my phone number, she happily accepted my email address (a junk one, b.t.w.) to let me know when she got rid of my profile. So there ya have it, just search Spoke for someone who looks important and use the auto-operator directory to call 'em up! Hey, maybe this Spoke concept isn't so bad after all. I should look up "important" a-holes at Skybus and give them a piece of my mind.
Seems they are trying to do build LinkedIn using strong-arm tactics. How sad.
I got a Google alert for my name originating from this site. I assume one of my esteemed cow-orkers has been scammed into signing up. All I would say is check out their Ts&Cs carefully.
Answer me this - How Do I Remove My Name From This Site Without Signing Up??? The 'privacy settings' can only be accessed by signing up. But I will never agree to the Ts&Cs.
I'm a South African. I suspect that my previous employer passed on its employee contact details to spoke as I saw that I, along with about 100 other people I know from that company, are all registered. Of course, neither I, nor the 5 people I asked had actaully registered themselves on the site. So I logged a help request on the spoke website asking to be removed and received an automated response saying that the issue would be addressed in about 24 hours. TWO WEEKS later, I replied to the address support@spoke.com and again asked to be removed. I got another automated repsonse asking me to respond to that mail. SO I did. Still nothing! I've just logged a complaint with www.truste.org. Let's see what happens now...
Why are Spoke, and others, allowed to take our information?
It's about time companies stop selling OUR personal information for profit. Write your government leaders, media outlets, and consumer watchdogs. I should not have to actively opt-out (if they allow it) or search for my info to protect my privacy.
Class-action lawsuit time. We've been trying to remove couple of friends and relative information and none of us are able to. Only way to remove is by involuntarily signing up and requesting to have the profile deleted. Even at that, we have not heard back or have seen any update on the profile.
Is this even legal? how can the information be public and entered into a site with potentially confidential information that was not consented?
I googled someone with his name and the name of his company. A Spoke link came up and when I clicked on it, I was at a page with his name, name of business (which confirmed for me that it was the correct one), and address. I needed a phone number, and it said "Join Spoke to get more information." I did this and received my email and activated my account. I then did a search for the name and company and came up with 0 results. So I did an advanced search and was able to input the state, which then gave me one incorrect answer, but 5 visible "partner search results" and the promise that I could "View all 10 reports" by clicking on those words. When I did I had my choice of the partners. Which I could access for a fee. Ironically, I received more information when I first googled the name, before I joined. This is terrible. Skipping the installs still leads me to are the list of partner sites, for a fee. This is a very deceptive "free" information site.
I also saw my company name on Spoke's website with bogus information. I've posted on a large forum I belong to for people to stay away from that site.