Spokeo.com - USA Online Directory

[Ibuki Shikishima]

Hi everyone,

Just wanted to let any USA users on this site know about this:

"There’s a site called Spokeo.com that’s a new online USA phone book with everyone’s personal information: everything from pics you’ve posted on Facebook or any other website anywhere. Along with your approx credit score, home value, income, age, etc. You can remove yourself by first searching for yourself on their site to find the URL on your page. Copy that URL, then hit the Privacy button on the bottom of their page to remove yourself. Check your email after that, click the Click Here button and then wait about 2 minutes and recheck and it should be gone."

.

The site only indexes people 18 and up, but. Man. -_-; Still. I'd advise you using the email search because I came up with nothing using my name. I received this email from my mom, who received it from her boss.

I won't keep this up as an announcement for long, but I figured it warranted some kind of.. announcement, given how some people might not like the idea of their information being so easily found.

[Persephone Anafeloz]

Those bastards. What's sad is that people can get away with this crap nowadays.

[Gen]

I think it's very similar to search engines like google; the only difference would be instead of searching for random keywords on the net, it searches for names, email addresses, IGNs, etc.
If spokeo do work on the principle of search engines, then there're ways to avoid it altogether; since search engines are limited to internet information, as long as your personal info stays well away from the internet, then you're in the clear.

One thing I noticed was that spokeo only reveals informations from uploading sites and social sites, like photobucket and facebook. This means game forums and personal forums' member info seems to be protected from spokeo. I have no idea if this is the same if you actually pay and get a membership though, since I've yet to pay for it.

I've tested a few ways to see if I can figure out how spokeo works; I made false accounts and information under the same email/name/IGN, and those false accounts and information comes up on spokeo, which seem to favour that spokeo does infact only extracts information from whatever's put up on the Net.

hope that relieves a few people.

tl;dr: Spokeo probably uses whatever infos on the Net only, so if you don't put your info on the Net, you're probably safe.

[Claudius]

Oh, my. This should further aid in my stalking.

[Valiant King]

My thoughts exactly~.