Online Privacy

Keeping your identity and personal information private is becoming harder to do especially if you belong to online social communities and such. There is an online directory, Spokeo where people can search for other people using a phone number, name, or email address.

I search for myself by my name first. When I did this it had listed the information I had listed under my profile/info on Facebook. It also graphed my credit score, our income, the average income of the people in my neighborhood, the average house value for my neighborhood, and so much more.

I searched via my email address and I saw pictures of my kids that were uploaded to Picasa and my blog. It even showed items I had purchased and items that were on wish lists for Target. If I had a paid membership of $2.95 a month I'd have access to the full report which would show all of the sites my email address was registered with.

The search via my phone number pulled up my address and the info on my neighborhood.

I don't know about you but I don't want just anyone to have access to this info. If you are like me then you need to remove yourself from this listing. Do this by searching for your name then copying the search result URL for yourself. Click on the privacy link at the bottom of the page and then follow the instructions of pasting the URL and so on. You need to do this for each way people can search for you: name, email, and phone number.

Go to http://www.spokeo.com/ to search and remove yourself from this listing.