A snooper snooped

Kevin Burton, founder of a Techmeme clone called Tailrank, has accused a Valleywag reporter of unethical behavior. At a Palo Alto networking event last night, Valleywag's Megan McCarthy was spotted scrolling through the doughy entrepreneur's cellphone contact list. "Yes," Megan confessed to me. "If I find an unattended phone, I'm going to pick it up and look at it. It's not a Valleywag thing, I'm just that nosy." Burton has every right to be outraged. Or would, had he not such a history of snooping himself: the horny young entrepreneur boasts that he picks up women at San Francisco internet cafes by secretly monitoring their instant message conversations, and then popping up in a new window to make his approach. [Burton says Wired misunderstood him.]

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