Spyware, viruses, & security forum: Poll: Are you concerned about sites like Spokeo.com?

There was my first love of loves who I haven't heard from her, her spouse or her son.
She was a CNA, like I was, but she is now a RN! Some of her information was lacking like her Ethnicity, her DOB, age was an approximation. She still resides in East Naples, FL for at 5 years. Sh may have lost my tel no. Having gone back to college. If I can afford www spokeo.com, I may find address, so I can write to her. Darrell

I guess if anyone was really that interested in wanting that much info they could probably get one way or another. I don't really understand why someone would want to know all that much about me anyway. So msecour I have to agree with you and more power to us!

Just because some personal information is 'public record' does not mean it should be this easily found by just anybody. In Washington State, a person can register with the Attorney General's office to reduce access to such 'public record' information. This includes residential addresses that must be on a drivers license or voter registration, for instance. It does not, however, include protection of that same information held by public utilities, such as the power company or water service to one's home. I have personal experience with my address being published on these nasty sites because it was picked up in a sweep of telephone company directories after the phone company published my addressed after being told not to. They made a careless mistake so I had to move!

There used to be some comfort in knowing that one's address could not fall into dangerous hands - that it would take months and possibly a private detective to find - obstacles that used to provide a measure of safety in themselves. This kind of outrageous publication of personal information can endanger the lives of victims of domestic violence.

If anyone here has ever been faced with being forced to suddenly relocate in order to outwit or outrun one of these monsters, they might not think this is such a minor matter. America is supposed to be a 'free country' . . . part of that freedom is being able to live one's life in peace. This kind of unauthorized publication is an enormous intrusion and should not be tolerated. If these sites want to publish directories and such, they should be REQUIRED to obtain the individuals' permission.

My daughter and her oldest son have been missing for 19 years (Feb 1991). Her husband is prime suspect of spousal and child murder. I have used this type of web pages to keep up with the ex son-in-law. Fortunately, I have critical info that makes his location rather easy to track.
Currently,the kids case is - No Bodies - No Crime. Until we locate their bodies, the case is nil.

A while ago, a friend forwarded a chain email to me about an "alarming" feature of Google, that you could just type in a phone number and get a name, address, and even a satellite picture of one's house! According to the email, somehow, this translated into the fabric of society falling apart with all of us falling victim to mass occurrences of abduction, murder, and child abuse. I pointed out to the sender that this information has been widely and publicly available for probably well over a hundred years, pretty much since the telephone was invented via that scurrilous scourge, the telephone book. Coles reverse directories have been in existence since long before I was born and you don't need a satellite picture of my house or a GPS to find me using a good old fashioned road map. All you have to do is take the most mundane irrelevancies, dress them up with a fancy font and some colored text and you can cause a riot. Yes, it's certainly true that there is much more information available right at anyone's fingertips and there is potential for as well as actual abuse. We do have to be careful, but we are bombarded with so much information that we have become oversensitized to every imagined threat no matter how remote or ill-conceived. Honestly, throughout all of human history, mankind has never been safer. Really. Perhaps that's why we've become so paranoid.

I checked information on a bunch of people I know on this and other similar sites. I didn't find anything on any of them that wasn't in the phone book. Those with unlisted numbers didn't show up at all, even if I searched for their unlisted numbers. Yes, there are ways of getting even unlisted information that generally require spending a bit of money, but that's been true long before there was an internet. Marketing companies mine data from all sorts of sources, DMVs, County real estate records, court records, credit info, etc., and create and sell detailed lists and databases. But my point is, this isn't something new that started with the web. Regardless of your comment about the Coles directories, I could buy a phone book specifically of unlisted numbers fifty years ago. It just cost more than the standard coles directory, that's all.

I'm not entirely sure what your point about the power company is. You said that your personal information was inadvertently published in the public telephone directory. But still, the very fact that these very recent privacy laws only give you the option to "opt out" should make it clear that this has been a problem for a very long time.

I'm not trying to trivialize your or anyone else's situation. My point is just that the only thing that has changed fundamentally is not our degree of privacy, but the ease with which such information can be readily obtained. Still, I stand by what I said. Your personal situation notwithstanding, as a society, we have never been safer. It's only been several hundred years since the vast majority of the human population, even in the most civilized parts of the world, lived in very real and constant fear of being literally hacked to pieces purely for sport, simply by going out in public. Forget one in four, there still are places on this planet today where women cannot go out alone in public AT ALL for fear of being raped or worse. Just remember, not long ago, that used to be the conditions prevalent EVERYWHERE on the planet.

If anything, the recent passage of a variety of privacy laws shows that we are trying to stem the tide, but I'm not sure how easy it will be to put the genie back in the bottle. Most people don't opt out, and, frankly, sometimes I think that the only real effect of these laws is to add a pamphlet that no one reads in our bank statements, credit card bills, and doctors visits. I'm not saying that everything is just fine, but good luck fighting the tide without living under a rock.

Of course we should be not just concerned but EXTREMELY concerned! This site provides hackers with a lot of the info that they'll need to set up identity theft. As far as I'm concerned, the more paranoid the better!

This is, in my opinion, Big Brother at it best. I see now why I get so many unsolicited phone calls!

I got nothing to hid from any one so that does not scare me to much but I do understand ot can dangerious this info can be in some peoples hands but when looking up my own name which had my adress but 1/2 the information was wrong

. . . but all the care an individual can muster won't help one single bit if the things we have to do, like have electricity, water, and gas at our homes just prove to be a back-door route to these creeps to capture our personal information and publish it without our permission.

Public or not, I do not want a REPOSITORY of all of my information available to just anyone. Sure, anyone can find the info, but they would have to look and it would take a while.

I didn't have a lot of information out there, and most of it was inaccurate; however, a friend of mine found that it had a ton of information about her and her family - including her minor children.

I read a complaint forum and the paying customers are not happy, because the information often wrong.

As a high school teacher, gang member students have said "you don't care whether you live or die, do you Mr. xxxx?", where I live and what I drive were common questions. And yes, I did tell them that gang members are cowards, they sneak up on victims and kill from ambush and out here, they kill more innocent people than their targets. My address and other info this easy to find is dangerous.

There maybe someone looking for me to do me and mine harm and can find me that way, easy. and vise versa.

I still have difficulty accepting that I had my "identity" stolen when
nothing was actually taken from my home. You can imagine my shock and outrage when my bank began declining transactions on my debit card while I was away from home. The thieves had simply copied the numbers without taking the card from my wallet when they broke into my hotel room while I was down the hall. But how they obtained the other information necessary for most debit transactions I have never figured out... but sites like this one can only make the crooks' lives easier. You can't imagine how many companies don't ask for all the information they should when taking a telephone order for example. So to learn that much of my personal information is available in one convenient location should delight the criminals, but it truly worries me. I know we live in the digital age, and I will agree that the information on such a site could be found elsewhere but for the life of me I can't think of one practical and positive reason for such information to be available in such a manner. I always wondered how my grandfather felt about all the personal information Who's Who included in his listing... but that at least had been checked and verified. No honest business or individual would try to get or use such information without going to the source, unless their motives were less than transparent.