StumbleUpon

January 5, 2003 12:05 PM

StumbleUpon is a browser plugin-in that "uses member ratings to form collective human opinions on website quality." The plugin-in then uses these ratings to recommend websites, much like Amazon.com recommends books.
posted by theWoodpecker (10 comments total)

i StumbledUpon(TM) this fascinating post!
posted by _sirmissalot_ at 12:19 PM on January 5, 2003

from the site:

With Whom Does StumbleUpon Share Information?
StumbleUpon may share information about you with advertisers, business partners, sponsors, and other third parties.
posted by the fire you left me at 12:19 PM on January 5, 2003

Didn't Alexa already fail at this?
posted by billsaysthis at 12:40 PM on January 5, 2003

Yeah, their privacy statement was written by a very sneaky legal team. Basically it says, We won't divulge your personal information without your permission. However, if you install the toolbar, you've given us permission to hand out your email address, IP address and browsing history to anyone and everyone that will give us a buck for it.

Brilliant.
posted by dejah420 at 1:18 PM on January 5, 2003

See also 3rd Voice; Annotea.
posted by holloway at 1:30 PM on January 5, 2003

hmm, it looks like you left out a pretty important sentence from the privacy policy:

"StumbleUpon may share information about you with advertisers, business partners, sponsors, and other third parties. However, we only divulge aggregate information about our users and will not share personally identifiable information with any third party without your express consent."

I don't see anything about giving consent by installing the toolbar. Oh, and another cool thing like stumbleupon but for music: gnoosic.com. I've already found a few new bands through this thing.
posted by theWoodpecker at 1:56 PM on January 5, 2003

theWoodpecker, also try Epitonic.
posted by the fire you left me at 2:06 PM on January 5, 2003

Nice idea, no mac IE support :( Many good websites are never going to be stumbled upon®, methinks.

Fire, thanks for epitonic, a cornucopia of new artists for the listening!
posted by elphTeq at 3:31 PM on January 5, 2003

Plug (it's my site): memigo. No information-sharing, good on both IE and Mozilla.
posted by costas at 7:37 AM on January 6, 2003

This is absurd. All of it.
posted by moses at 9:43 AM on January 6, 2003