According to this C|Net News piece, PayPal co-founder and Facebook-backer Peter Thiel is a major investor in two websites designed to spy on social network users.

The first website is called RapLeaf, and there your personals are public. Using an e-mail address, you can find out the user’s name, age and any social network affiliations. You can also signup to “manage your privacy”, which is quite humorous, considering that to sign up you have to give up personal information.

The second website is known as Upscoop, whose moto is “Get the scoop on all your friends.” and allows you to discover what social networks people in your contact list belong to. To use this website, you’ll have to cough up your username and password for Gmail, AOL, Hotmail or Yahoo.

I am guess I shouldn’t be surprised, PayPal can be credited with having re-invented  the idea of privacy violation and this just goes to show what the people behind PayPal are thinking about.

I originally learned of this from a post on Pogo Was Right.

A lawsuit seeking class action status was recently filed in The United States District Court for the Northern District of California against eBay, Inc. for allegedly engaging in anti-competitive business practices. The suit was filed on July 25, 2007 by Jeffery Enebely, an eBay seller since 2000 and residing in Oakland, California, according to the Complaint.

Specifically, the allegations center around eBay’s monopolistic behavior in the marketplace and its use of that position to force sellers and buyers to use PayPal. Also at issue is the exclusion of Google Checkout from eBay, which the suit contends is unjust and unfair.

Additional information about the lawsuit, including a copy of the actual court filings, can be accessed on our Other Lawsuits page. The docket number is 5:07-CV-03803-PVT.