Online privacy compromised by spokeo.com

[festus]

My wife found this and it is the ultimate intelligence asset for career criminals!!!
Remove your info today!!!! The amount of info they had on us was shocking...home value, address, hobbies you name it. It made me cringe.
THIS IS REAL!There's a site called Spokeo.com that's a new online USA phone book w/personal information: everything from pics you've posted on FB or web, your approx credit score, home value, income, age, etc. You can remove yourself by first searching for yourself on their site to find the URL of your page, then going to the Privacy button on the bottom of their page to remove yourself.

[Curmudgeon]

Privacy? The only information spokeo has about me is information I have decided to make public, therefore there is no privacy compromised.

meh.

I'm listed in the white pages, both online and in the book. Take that info and go to google, you can see images of my house and property. Big deal, you can see that just driving down my street and you don't need to go to the expense of a computer.

meh.

Take the address and go to zillow.com (just one example) and you can find out what I paid for my house, as well as that of all my neighbors, and even an estimation of the current value. All public information, always has been.

meh.

Don't want your photos on spokeo, then don't post them on FaceBook. Don't want people to know where you work, don't post it on LinkedIn. This is all common sense folks.

meh.

You can't post your personal information openly on the internet and then "sound the alarm" because people can see the very information you made public. That's not very bright.

"This has been a public service announcement from your Uncle Curmudgeon. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming."



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[sFe]

I'm not on there at all..

[Curmudgeon]

I'm not on there at all..

Then you truly don't exist. Awesome! You should stop paying taxes!

[m1gunr]

Spokeo had my pic listed for everyone with my name across the country

[toreskha]

I'm on there...three times, for three old addresses, and the information is wildly inaccurate.

This kind of information is annoying, but there's a million clones of Spokeo out there. They all get their info from the same sources, so cut off or restrict the sources as much as possible and you're good. The information will expire out of the Spokeos over time. Their primary sources are usually things like...

- Property appraisers
- Other public records sources available from government sources, including birth, marriage, death, divorce, civil and criminal courts at all levels, tax rolls, various gun licenses in many cases, etc
- Charitable donation records
- Political donation records that show who you gave to
- Voter rolls, which are public record and available for purchase
- Facebook and related social networking
- Credit reporting bureaus
- Anyone to whom you sign up and they decide to sell your information (catalogs, Radio Shack, etc)
- Random news articles, which include delinquent tax notices, foreclosures, condemnations, etc.
- Google, obviously
- The list probably goes on endlessly, and don't forget that information stored in other countries is subject to other laws!

Your best bet for protecting your privacy is not erasing yourself, necessarily...but redirecting your information. If you create a vacuum, it's likely to get filled by something. Instead, eliminate what you can, and for the rest, get a UPS or PO box and a Google Voice number and use that. Anyone who wants to find you will hit a brick wall, and you can decide if you want to entertain their company or not.

[nogods]

I just learned I'm stilled married. i thought I was divorced in 1995.

[Itstjs]

Websites like Spokeo.com and Wikileaks.com or anything like them should be removed from the Internet, and their monitors should be charged. Allowing the posting of "Classified documents" I thought was some sort of crime? Or violating the Privacy act was a crime? Eh, what ever, someone someday will pay big time, until then, were screwed.

[nogods]

Websites like Spokeo.com and Wikileaks.com or anything like them should be removed from the Internet, and their monitors should be charged. Allowing the posting of "Classified documents" I thought was some sort of crime? Or violating the Privacy act was a crime? Eh, what ever, someone someday will pay big time, until then, were screwed.

Violating the law to obtain the information might be a crime. But publishing information provided by a violator should not be a crime.

Think of the other side of the coin. An LEO cannot break into your house and obtain evidence against you without violating the 4th amendment and probably subjecting the evidence to the exclusionary rule.

But if an independent thief breaks into your house and steals such evidence, then provides it to the police, the government will claim that it can be used against you.

Wikileaks and other publishers are like the police in the last example. They are merely using information provided to them. They are not obtaining that information illegally.

[Hatchet]

they got my age wrong and i aint married...my big worry, do they really have my financial information...