Have you ever heard of the web site spokeo.com? Just earlier today I stumbled across this website when I was doing some research on Facebook's proposed policy changes and boy was I surprised. Spokeo is a social network aggregator. This means that the site searches social networks and other sources of record on the internet (ex. Online Phone books, mailing lists, etc) and complies all of the results in one place. When a user searches a name, information such as social networking data, demographics, estimated property values, and even personal wealth. None of the information returned in the searches is originated by Spokeo and they cite that the search results are "only as good as their source."
On June 12, 2012, Spokeo was fined $800,000 by the Federal Trade Commission for collecting information about people's personal lives and selling the information collected to prospective employers without protecting the people's privacy.
After running a quick search of myself on Spokeo, it turned up a satellite view of my house, my address, relatives related to me, as well as other information from social networking sites. Additional information such as my phone number, an estimate of my income, and ethnicity was available for a fee as low as $3.95/month. This search was very eye opening to me. Of course, anybody could find out my address and search my house on Google Maps, or find my phone number in a directory with a little effort. However, Spokeo made obtaining this information a little too easy. In addition, Spokeo does allow a person to remove their information from the website. It also states that because they do not create any of the information, it will still be available through the originator of the data.
I encourage anybody who reads this blog post to go to Spokeo and search for themselves. While searching myself it gave me an uneasy feeling, it is also definitely going to make me more aware of what I put on social networks and whether I tag my location or not.
-Curt R
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