Spokeo.com

[kane_magus]

This was posted by one of my FB friends:

"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, even credit card #'s. Remove yourself by searching your name, find your page, copy the URL and then go to the bottom of the page and click on the Privacy link to remove yourself. I was really concerned that this might be a scam. A way perhaps to get our email address, and we have one that we use only for junk stuff, but I went to check and it was just creepy to see our house, some of our kids names, etc."

I went to the site and checked it out myself, and all of that stuff appears to be true. I found a listing for myself, associated with my home address, among other things like that. They want you to pay if you want to see a "Full Report" though. I've already gone in and removed my own listing, as well as the listing for my father and my mother. Note that my father and mother are both in their 70s and have never used a computer before in their lives, yet they were both still listed in this thing. For that matter, my mother was actually listed twice, by her first name and by her middle name (which is the one she actually goes by for most things).

Also, they only let you remove two listings per email address, but if you've got multiple email addresses you can use those. Afterward, I did a search again, and it does appear to actually remove the listings, but I don't know if they're not just temporarily hiding them or something to make you think they removed them.

This is a really scuzzy, sinister thing, in my opinion. Who the hell do these people think they are?

(EDIT)

http://www.snopes.com/computer/internet/spokeo.asp

http://urbanlegends.about.com/b/2010/04/07/spokeo-com-scam.htm

http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/12/theres-absolutely-nothing-you-can-do-about-spokeo-so-stop-whining/

Man, what a load of horseshit.

(/EDIT)

Comments

[hikarugenji.livejournal.com]

It's not the first site to do this; it's not that hard to set up a site like that since they just pull data from a bunch of internet sites that are already out there.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

In retrospect, that's not really all that surprising, even though it admittedly did surprise me. And as Korb has been telling me on Twitter, they probably are counting on people to hear about it and get all enraged about it like I have and then spread the word about them, hoping that at least one person who hears about it will be shitty enough to actually pay them to snoop on others.

Still, I think I'd rather be informed about the existence of the site, and the means to remove the info, than to have remained in the dark about it. Of course, from what I've heard on FB, it doesn't actually permanently remove your info even if you take the steps to do so. Some people said that they'd removed their stuff before but that it just came back again later.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

In any case, it makes me feel like I've fallen for one of the retarded Internet scams that I'm so quit to deride others for falling for. :/ But even so, as I said, I'd personally still rather be aware of the site than not, so spreading the word isn't necessarily an altogether bad thing, I think.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

quit=quick