Security watch: Keeping up with your friends

To get an idea of how public one’s social networking habits are, sign up at Spokeo.com, a site that claims it will keep track of your pals on all the usual popular places like Facebook or MySpace.

After creating a free Spokeo account, the site will start trawling about and find which of your friends belong to which social network sites. Sure enough it will start tracking whether your kid has just added a new photo on Flickr, or if your mom is posting something on Friendster.

What usually happens is that at some point Spokeo will later contact you. Depending on how active you are, it will then report finding “accounts” in your name at all sorts of Web sites, such as Amazon, Picasa, StumbleUpon, Pandora and others. Those are not social networking sites, but it’s alarming that Spokeo will start discovering your use of those sites.

Spokeo even says it will go to the trouble of making those accounts private for you, if you wish. Which is probably the only good reason to use Spokeo.

But at that point, who knows how much else of your Web history can never be made private?