This site aggregates all publicly available information onto one easy, convenient search engine.
It seems to only involve Americans, from my own personal searches.
What scares me is that you can pay for membership to gain access to even MORE information on each person. :\
I did my own personal name search & a couple of friends, and nothing bad showed up for me (as I am in Canada), but I am not sure about the Americans.
I’ve gone to their privacy page and asked them to take down my info.
Let’s see what happens.
Update: In my case, my email address was removed a couple of minutes after I submitted my request via their privacy page & when I did a new search, the listing was not found.
That being said, a reader told me about this on Facebook & says that the removal process is not always respected, here’s what she wrote:
Yes they finally did remove my info, they had it all. I mean my FULL address and even my cell and each member of my family! it was a nightmare and they did remove it but it shows that you have to be super careful with what you provide to which companies. I also think their “sponsor” company is a scam just to get your money to protect your privacy.
not only do you have to remove your info from their site but also from all of the sites that list your info like bebo, etc. it was crazy but I got all my stuff removed. Believe it or not my last name is kind of common and obviously there are a lot of annas out there too so most of the stuff googled under my name is not even me!
Wow… that's a bit spooky. It doesn't have my name but found some limited info on my email addresses. Thanks for the head's up!
I looked this up some time ago and basically what I found out was the information they post is publicly available anyway. So if someone wanted to find out this information removing it from Spokeo wouldn't stop it. From what I understood the only way to avoid this is to go to all the 3rd party sites where spokeo aggregates the info from (which includes phonebooks, social networking sites, etc.) and remove your info from there. Here's some more info… .http://www.snopes.com/computer/internet/spokeo.asp
To sum it up, yeah, it sucks (particularly that they try and SELL this info), but if someone wanted to hunt you down they could do it on their own either way.
That’s true. It is just information we’ve posted publicly online, but even so.. I’d be nervous having a site aggregate all of that into something that could be purchased by anybody, not just companies.
This seems very scary to me too. Its way too easy to get all of your personal data on the Internet these days.
I just checked my name and there was nothing listed for me. whew
I found that site a while back and removed what I did find. It wasn't much but still! I then went to the sites that were listed where they got my information and changed settings and deleted much of my information on those sites, as well. As far as Facebook, I check my privacy settings a few times a week since they can't seem to leave anything alone lately!
AGREED!
I’ve just removed information from Facebook entirely. It drives me crazy
Thanks for alerting me of this site! The funny thing is, they have incorrect (severely out-of-date) information on me — they still have me listed as living with my parents! And no, their house is NOT worth $1 million. I've asked them to remove my profile, and will do searches for close friends and family and let them know of this site as well.
Thank you for the information. I have removed my email profile as well.
You’re welcome. It scared me to see how much info I could gather on someone.