Deleting Internet "People Finder Sites" Info., Worth It? [View all]
You may have run across various people finder websites when trying to find forgotten friends' phone numbers or addresses. Or maybe — as I discovered — a near stranger found out a lot about me by paying a small fee.
If you're uncomfortable with the information that’s publicly available about you, you can try to delete yourself by using one of the online reputation services, like DeleteMe. I did this, and for the most part it’s been successful. But buyer beware: It can be costly.
People finder companies like Spokeo, White Pages and BeenVerified offer detailed background reports on individuals that can include contact information, addresses, properties owned or leased, court and criminal records, liens, judgments and more. To access the database you’ll generally pay a fee that varies by how much information you want. Law enforcement, private investigators and journalists regularly utilize these services. So, too, do stalkers, ex-spouses, and others seeking to invade your privacy.
“People-search sites have some of the most sensitive and revealing information,” Gennie Gebhart, a consumer privacy, surveillance, and security issues expert with the Electronic Frontier Foundation said. “If it’s publicly viewable information about you on the Internet, it’s probably being ‘scraped.’”
People-search sites also aggregate information not normally considered public: our cell phone and Social Security numbers, our kids’ names, where we work, what movies we’ve seen, even our Amazon wish lists.
Check yourself out. I think you will be very uncomfortable with what you find. I was surprised to find that just one week after my divorce was finalized my marital status had been updated to “single.” The names and addresses of my close relatives were listed, as were my phone numbers going back more than 20 years...Cont.
Read More: USA Today, "Delete Yourself from the Internet's People Finder Sites: Is It Worth It?", May 4, 2018
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/delete-yourself-from-the-internets-people-finder-sites-is-it-worth-it/ar-AAwJtMw?li=BBnbcA1
>Any experience with this, is it effective or a rip off?
= new reply since forum marked as read
