It looks like eBay CEO Meg Whitman is going to invade the small town of Bettendorf, IA to stump for presidential candidate Mitt Romney. This is an interesting wrinkle, with eBay screwing all of its buyers and sellers over constantly, its not really a surprise that they’d like to see a pro-big business candidate like Romney get elected. Such presidents are often very helpful in getting legislation through that legalizes such screwings or helps to make it difficult for consumers to hold companies responsible for them.

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.