Spokeo.com - BEWARE!

[Pilgrim]

One of my daughters just alerted me to a website called Spokeo.com. This is a personal information website that harvests personal stuff from all over the web and posts it under the guise of being a "friend finder" site. I was surprised - to say the least - at the amount of information (available for free) they had about me and my family right down to a picture of my house, and I don't belong to any of the social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. It's just an unfortunate fact of life now that anyone who goes on the internet loses a good bit of privacy, but IMHO this an unauthorized intrusion that goes beyond the norm.

I would encourage everyone to check out this site. On the one hand, it's really good for catching up on long-lost friends or acquaintances, but if they're publishing more of your personal info than you're comfortable with you might want to remove your profile by exercising the privacy option at the bottom of the page. I'm inserting the link below - although it doesn't say "spokeo", that's where it will take you.

People Search | White Pages | Find People | FREE!

 

[Turtle]

People really need to be more aware of protecting their privacy on the Internet. Kids these days (I sound like an old fart) could care less, for the most part, and share far too much information about themselves. Spokeo is an aggregator, much like Google, where they gather together already publicly available information into a single place. They get them from phone books, social networks, marketing surveys, real estate listings, business websites, and other public sources, including Google Street View (which makes a certain Canadian I know just all giggity ).

When you post something to the Internet, it's there forever and people can and will do pretty much whatever they want to with it, and we can't claim they are using our personal information, because it's already public information. I recall a very fine fellow who used to be here on EO who got a little bit too full of himself, thought he could threaten people with physical harm because he thought he was anonymous on the Internet, and then took a speedy little dump in his pants when his picture got posted here online. Even though his name was not attached in way to the picture, he claimed that by posting that picture, someone had posted his personal information to the Internet without his permission. He completely ignored the fact that he himself was the one who posted his picture to the Internet, and someone else merely reposted his already publicly available information. He was not a happy camper, but he learned a valuable lesson that day.

 

[jaminjim]

So Turtle are you saying that it is a safe site to input my name?

 

[Turtle]

Well, it's not unsafe.

It's just an aggregator, nothing more. Unless you actually give it more information that it already has, it won't steal any from you. If nothing else, it's worth going there just to see how much of your information is easily and widely available to others. DO several searches, like with your phone number.

And especially any and all e-mail addresses you've used. It will show you right there how you can be traced and tracked in a manner seconds. How much crap gets returned shows how well you've been covering your tracks, or how careful you've been with your information. It also tells you, in a round about way, where you might want to go and delete or modify your information, so it doesn't get aggregated so easily.

My phone number finds me, of course, but it's a cell phone and it doesn't know exactly where I live. One of my e-mail addresses finds me, and where I live (tho it's out of date), and because I use that same e-mail address for Photobucket, it finds all those pics, too.

All in all, there's not much available on me, really. I keep a close eye on what I make available, generally.