Here’s a quickie for you that has nothing to do with saving money, but everything to do with protecting your privacy: Check out this post on Cool Mom Tech to find out how to remove your personal information from an aggregate site called Spokeo.
I was able to find myself on there multiple times, and it only took me about five minutes to get everything removed. Scary stuff. (Yes, I know personal information in this digital age is everywhere. That doesn’t mean I have to be okay with a site showing my name, address, and a satellite picture of my house, though!)
Wow. That is creepy.
What I posted on their site:
Check out Snopes re: Spokeo (http://www.snopes.com/computer/internet/spokeo.asp). Basically, your information is still out there publically, and another aggregator like Spokeo will provide your data. If someone really wants to find you, they will. Tinfoil hat thought: if you remove yourself from Spokeo, you may have just confirmed your data AND provided an updated email address to those underlying databases.
This thing is FREAKING ME OUT. My current address of course, but then I searched my maiden name and found the house where I grew up, plus all my college addresses. My middle name was on one of them.
But I can’t decide if I want to remove them or not.
At some addresses, it also thinks I’m in my 50’s. Awesome.
thanks Mir, Good info.
I checked mine one time and it said I live in a house worth $1million in a neighborhood where the houses are worth $50,000 on average. Yay for me (although my neighbors must hate me, right?). The information, other than my publicly available info was so wildly inaccurate, that I did not bother to delete it.
I was in there twice. Both the the same (correct) street address, but wrong city in one, and wrong state in the other.
Mark, I think you’re right. I took my info off Spokeo a few years ago. I just checked to see what was on there: it’s all back AND they now have my email address on there, too. Huh, wonder how they got that? (Luckily, I don’t use the one that I gave them to remove my stuff back then anymore, but still…) It irks me that I already did everything, and it’s right back on there with even more info.
Also, I can tell you exactly how they received some of their information: Discover card. I opened a card when I was in college and they misspelled my first and middle names on it. I never used the card (I mean, my name was misspelled, so if they can’t even get that right…), and I never cared enough to get it fixed. They eventually closed it because I never used it. Anyway, the point is that the exact misspelling of my name? The one that ONLY Discover ever had? Is the one that’s on there for my college address and my parents’ address at the time I was in college. Very interesting…(it’s a very awkward misspelling, too, and isn’t even a person’s name in the least. Sheesh.)
I wish I had read these comments before I requested to be deleted. It is very scary but we are indeed confirming the information. I should have left up the incorrect info. Sigh.
Oh, great. So I gave them my private email address now, so they can publish that, too? AWESOME. Maybe this CoolMomTech site needs to be aware of this lovely side effect.
Again, because anyone could request deletion of any info, I’m not sure how giving them an email address (though, again, I wouldn’t recommend using your primary one) “confirms” anything, really.
Mark (above) is correct that this information exists out there whether you delete it from Spokeo or not. What you’re doing is requesting it be removed from this particular source. It’s like junk mail, people, you can’t do away with it entirely… you can just stop it one site at a time.