For just a few dollars a month, anyone can have access to pretty much all of your private information. If someone wants to know the address of where you grew up, find out your social security number, and get the names of your relatives, all it takes is a creeper with a monthly subscription to Spokeo and it’s all theirs.
It kind of more than scares the crap out of me because HEY LOOK! Here’s a few of the addresses where I’ve lived for the past THIRTY-SOMETHING YEARS:
Kristen at Cool Mom Tech published a how-to guide letting us know the easiest way to request that your personal information is removed from Spokeo, and thank the Baby Jeesus she has.
I can’t even begin to understand why all of my personal information is available in one place for anyone to access. But I guess I can be grateful the site has provided a way to remove the information I never gave them permission to sell in the first place? I realize that most of my personal information is available to find on the internet for a savvy researcher. With a few nuggets of my personal data, parsing together my life’s history isn’t impossible for the snoop who wants it. Spokeo has taken all of those nuggets, parsed them together, and sells them to anyone with a credit card and a creepy penchant for stalking.
Cool Mom Tech has the details on how you can remove your listing from Spokeo, or you can go to the site’s privacy page to get started right away.
Of course, you have to hand over your email address to Spokeo, verify that it is in fact your email address, and give them yet another piece of your personal information.
And now I’ve officially creeped myself out even more that I think about that.
screenshots via Spokeo
This is awful. What we’re the creators thinking when they started this site? “Hey, let’s make it super easy for stalkers and creepers to do their thing, and for a small fee we can make it easy for identity thieves to to get social security numbers! There is no way this will be anything other then Awesome.”
Just so you know, I’ve had myself removed more than twice from Spokeo. So removing yourself doesn’t solve the problem.
My friend has requested her information be removed at least 7 times and they have not done it.
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