View Full Version : I can only describe this website as scary
21BravoInDaSand
04-13-2010, 22:07
http://www.spokeo.com/ is just a bad idea for those of us who care about our (& our loved ones) privacy, see for yourself, men. The info on there isn't even correct the majority of the time, although it's funny how we all seem to live in million dollar houses according to spokeo. I was on there but my parents weren't. Doesn't seem to have rhyme or reason since I don't have a facebook or myspace page yet my parents are both "facebookies", as I like to call them.
You can search anyone, anywhere in the US. Freakin scary & reminds me of "Heat" where Deniro's character is talking to Tom Noonan's character about getting blueprints & the amount of money in the bank & he asks how did he find all this, to which the man replies "This stuff just flies through the air. This information is beamed out all over the f!@#ing place, you just gotta know how to grab it."
To remove yourself, c+p the url with your name once you have found & clicked on yourself, go to the bottom of the page & click on Privacy & follow the steps. Entering your email is a requirement that I was skeptical of until I received a confirmation email from them immediately afterward & then searched my name again & it was indeed gone.
Oh, by the way...
http://www.ant.com/site/professionalsoldiers.com/Professionalsoldiers.com Rank: #159,942
3 month avg: 159942 Pages view: 3.08
1 month avg: 147698 Previous rank: 184585
1 week avg: 168875 Rank evolution: NA
Yesterday: 0
Professionalsoldiers.com is the 159942th most visited website of internet.
Entire post.Did you search your email addresses? The results may your IP addresses.
21BravoInDaSand
04-13-2010, 22:44
WOW! My old page from a few years ago! Jesus!
The neat thing is that in order to get your info off the site, you have to provide a valid email address which, in turn, gives them more information about you.:munchin
Hey look - Michelle Obama's house is on there and their median income is 41K :D
http://www.spokeo.com/search?q=Michelle%20Obama#Illinois:909758697
http://www.spokeo.com/search?q=Barack%20Obama#Illinois:902887427:9097586 97
So is Rahm Emanuel:
http://www.spokeo.com/search?q=Rahm%20Emanuel#:2036451877
Rod Blagojevich is on there too...LOL
http://www.spokeo.com/search?q=Rod%20Blagojevich#:245175267
Edited to add...
And it says they're not interested in politics.....
The Bill Ayers ?
http://www.spokeo.com/search?q=William%20Ayers#Illinois:898739147
GratefulCitizen
04-14-2010, 13:49
It had plenty of info wrong on me, and that was just the basic stuff.
Had the wrong physical address, too.
It does help that Page doesn't have mail delivery, and I don't have internet nor cable tv at home.
Few pictures online of family members, no names are attached to those few.
If this scares you, read Super Crunchers by Ian Ayres.
A great deal about you can be inferred from seemingly unrelated personal information.
Data mining is a powerful tool in the information age.
Snopes take on Spokeo:
http://www.snopes.com/computer/internet/spokeo.asp
This hits me as being like "googling" yourself. Never EVER google yourself.
Why provide more information to folks like this, on your own accord?
21BravoInDaSand
04-14-2010, 14:33
Thanks Crue, snopes is a great internet asset & said this at the bottom of the page
NOTE: By running some trials with Spokeo, we've found that:
* The information returned to paying customers through Spokeo searches is not very detailed and is often inaccurate.
* Our repeated trials with requesting the blocking of a particular record through Spokeo's privacy page have found the procedure to be highly questionable: no attempt is made to verify that the person requesting the blocking of a record is the person identified by that record, our efforts have never resulted in a successfully blocked record, and Spokeo's customer service group has not responded to any inquiries. All of this has led some to speculate that one of Spokeo's core businesses is actually the collecting of e-mail addresses.
Wait, maybe I'm being a "knuckledragger" here, but I didn't think googling yourself added any more info than was already out there.
By googling yourself, you highlight yourself, thus making it easier for other folks to find you in the same manner.
You also should be aware of your identity online. If you use the same name in multiple forums it is very is to start putting information together, especially if it is an "odd" screen name.
not to dime anyone out but 2 min of searching showed me one of the posters in this thread's name, school (WSU), where they work, thier picture, among other things.
Also if you own a website/domain people can find your address from whois.net
You also should be aware of your identity online. If you use the same name in multiple forums it is very is to start putting information together, especially if it is an "odd" screen name.
not to dime anyone out but 2 min of searching showed me one of the posters in this thread's name, school (WSU), where they work, thier picture, among other things.
Well, I have Gooled my screen name a couple of time since 2004, and a ton of stuff comes up that is NOT about me. Considering I was only a part of one other web-forum, then my screen name should not lead to me, as a person! But if it does, so be it. I like TS statement, "I hide in plain site!"
Holly
GratefulCitizen
04-14-2010, 17:19
You also should be aware of your identity online. If you use the same name in multiple forums it is very is to start putting information together, especially if it is an "odd" screen name.
not to dime anyone out but 2 min of searching showed me one of the posters in this thread's name, school (WSU), where they work, thier picture, among other things.
Also if you own a website/domain people can find your address from whois.net
You have to consider what the purposes are behind your desire for privacy.
If someone wants to actively investigate you, there's not much you can do.
My primary concern would be avoiding passive automated aggregation of personal data.
This exposes you to possible problems which haven't even been thought of yet.
(internet data is forever)
Got cable tv?
The information flows both directions.
In some places, this has been going on for nearly 30 years.
The television you watch says much.
One of the big problems of having a pile of information out there is the limitation of market choices.
Advertisements and offers will be targeted to push your psychological buttons.
Looking to buy a big-ticket item?
There may already be a "profile" in the hands of the dealer selling to you.
He'll know what to offer and what you'll pay.
You can get taken economically and not even know it.
Dozer523
04-14-2010, 19:52
well . . . I googled my ass and all of them led me right back here!
Leozinho
04-14-2010, 21:18
By googling yourself, you highlight yourself, thus making it easier for other folks to find you in the same manner.
Can you explain this better?
alfromcolorado
04-15-2010, 04:13
Site has my address from years ago with a over million dollar house in a below average neighborhood...
But then, I never spell my name correctly... For some reason I never quite learned how to do that... ;)
Can you explain this better?
From what my friends who are in IT tell me. Everytime something is googled, it moves up the "chain" of links. So the more often someone is googled, the more likely that hit will be one of the first to show up, when googled again.
If you have a common name, there may not be as big of a liklihood of you being one of the first links. But if you have an uncommon name, sure as God made little bunnies, you will more than likely show up in the first couple of pages of links.
Team Sergeant
04-15-2010, 09:22
Oh, by the way...
[url]http://www.ant.com/site/professionalsoldiers.com/Professionalsoldiers.com Rank: #159,942
3 month avg: 159942 Pages view: 3.08
1 month avg: 147698 Previous rank: 184585
1 week avg: 168875 Rank evolution: NA
Yesterday: 0
Professionalsoldiers.com is the 159942th most visited website of internet.
Kind of crazy once you realize we've never advertized our internet presence. We're getting about 20K unique hits a month. In the US we're ranked 79,900 on the internet.
http://www.quantcast.com/professionalsoldiers.com/summary
From what my friends who are in IT tell me. Everytime something is googled, it moves up the "chain" of links. So the more often someone is googled, the more likely that hit will be one of the first to show up, when googled again.
If you have a common name, there may not be as big of a liklihood of you being one of the first links. But if you have an uncommon name, sure as God made little bunnies, you will more than likely show up in the first couple of pages of links.
I'm a web software engineer at the moment, so I might be able to help with this explanation. Google operates on such ridiculous volumes that a single person searching for their own name is unlikely to have much of an impact on the search suggestions.
Now, if there's a particular search result that you're not happy with you might not want to constantly search for your name and then click on that result, since that data is almost definitely tracked and used to influence rankings, but overall I wouldn't worry too much about it. Google is very secretive about their algorithms, but overall the way to get a particular website ranked higher is to link to it from other websites -- the higher the rank of the referring site the better. This isn't something most people end up accidentally affecting without creating websites, or spreading their name on forums or something.
It's pretty difficult to figure out what you need (if anything) to clean up on the internet without searching for yourself, so I'd encourage anyone that wants to be more anonymous to be active in their efforts, and not be afraid of searching for their name.
Hope that helps.
Thanks Crue, snopes is a great internet asset...
I equate Snopes to Wikipedia. You can use it as the starting point for additional, independent research, but its a less-than-reliable single source.
I'm a web software engineer at the moment, so I might be able to help with this explanation. Google operates on such ridiculous volumes that a single person searching for their own name is unlikely to have much of an impact on the search suggestions.
Now, if there's a particular search result that you're not happy with you might not want to constantly search for your name and then click on that result, since that data is almost definitely tracked and used to influence rankings, but overall I wouldn't worry too much about it. Google is very secretive about their algorithms, but overall the way to get a particular website ranked higher is to link to it from other websites -- the higher the rank of the referring site the better. This isn't something most people end up accidentally affecting without creating websites, or spreading their name on forums or something.
It's pretty difficult to figure out what you need (if anything) to clean up on the internet without searching for yourself, so I'd encourage anyone that wants to be more anonymous to be active in their efforts, and not be afraid of searching for their name.
Hope that helps.
Thanks for the info!
The Google team provided valuable information a few years back that is available here (http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html).
While I'm concerned about my own privacy, I'm even more worried about the potential for mistaken identity if someone I know were to Google my name. The other me is a poet whose work is so lousy that doggerel looks good by comparison.
Leozinho
04-15-2010, 15:40
I'm a web software engineer at the moment, so I might be able to help with this explanation. Google operates on such ridiculous volumes that a single person searching for their own name is unlikely to have much of an impact on the search suggestions.
Now, if there's a particular search result that you're not happy with you might not want to constantly search for your name and then click on that result, since that data is almost definitely tracked and used to influence rankings, but overall I wouldn't worry too much about it. Google is very secretive about their algorithms, but overall the way to get a particular website ranked higher is to link to it from other websites -- the higher the rank of the referring site the better. This isn't something most people end up accidentally affecting without creating websites, or spreading their name on forums or something.
It's pretty difficult to figure out what you need (if anything) to clean up on the internet without searching for yourself, so I'd encourage anyone that wants to be more anonymous to be active in their efforts, and not be afraid of searching for their name.
Hope that helps.
That's what I figured, and I agree with your assessment. Knowing your online identity (such as what pops up when you google your name) is much, much more important than worrying about a minor bump in page rank of some website.
AngelsSix
04-15-2010, 16:35
I Googled my name and now realize that I am famous and someone owes me BIG bucks for the royalties. Sheesh! I wish I'd done that sooner....I'm calling my lawyer!:rolleyes:
GratefulCitizen
04-16-2010, 11:07
People are way to worried about being actively investigated by others, and are way to worried about perceptions/reputations.
Life is not "The Truman Show".
What most of the world thinks of any one of us: nothing.
They're not thinking about you.
Various significant things happened in someones life here in the US yesterday.
A billion people in China don't know. If they did know, they don't care.
We are all strangers to most everyone else in the world.