I never show up on these sites, and I suspect that it's because I'm not in the phonebook and have never established formal residency outside of my birth state, nor have I ever been arrested or detained by the po po. So all public records w/ address information are from my childhood and it doesn't seem that the datasets they're accessing go back that far.

I do agree that it's a good idea to purge yourself from these databases, because I have a strong suspicion that they're affiliated w/ organized crime. You'll notice that none of them have ever been acquired by other legitimate companies, though the data they provide is very valuable. But instead they all seem to operate at the same level, as shady find-your-ex services.

Even for an organized crime outfit, it's surprising that Spokeo provides curbside addresses and mapping for free. Not to be paranoid, but I wouldn't want everyone who cares to know to be able to find my house, my likeness, my job, etc.. They make it way to easy to scope out peoples homes from crime.

All these people are doing is taking a bunch of public databases and cross-linking them. Although it is creepy, and makes it a little TOO easy for someone to go finding everything out in one location.

However, it also seems to be several years behind me, so I'm not terrified. Once you own a property you show up in all kinds of databases.

I removed mine. They even had a pretty accurate estimate of my home value. That's scary. Thanks.

This is a disturbing collection of data. I don't believe it is crime based. It is merely a collection of public data from a variety of sources pooled into one lump.

It squicked me out to find out what was out there.

Also, you have to (or used to have to) search and block several ways to get total removal. By name, email and I think address or phone. I can't recall.

Nasty business.

Brian is correct. Anybody can go to zillow or realtytrac and pull up info on your home, including your mortgage amounts. I have zillow on my Iphone and can drive through a neighborhood and get house values. It's linked to Satellite.

But this is all in one place, which makes it a lot easier for anyone to target you. They even have your relationship status.

This line is sort of telling on the removal page:

Your information will still be shown on other people search sites, and you will need to contact those third-party sites one-by-one, or use ReputationDefender* to protect your online identity.

* From the www.reputation.com link ReputationDefender is now Reputation.com, Inc.

In addition -- I use Ghostery. When I hit the Reputation website -- it had ten different tags on it, and only five were automatically blocked. Every thing from Facebook to Yahoo to Salesforce.

I think you were just spammed.

I discovered it the other day when googling an old friend. Creepy.

I found mine, though the info was at least a year out of date and my current location wasn't listed. Weird, though, how they got so much information, yet managed to fudge the details. Not sure why they think I like baseball, for example (I don't), or why they think anyone on earth would care.

Wow, according to Spokeo I'm married. My SO will be quite upset when I have to tell him.

I was sucked in too and did the removal. Luckily I used my spam catcher address -- not my primary one.

From Snopes, which concludes that it's likely a way to collect email addresses and that you'll just show back up again.

http://www.snopes.com/computer/internet/spokeo.asp

My information was a couple of years old but I had them remove it just because I deplore the idea that someone can get that much info on me. If they really want to know that much about me, they are going to have to spend some bucks to get it. I have remained mostly under the radar with these things because I use a PO Box for everything and until recently had no public utilities in my name (they were all in my deceased husband's name until I moved last year). But like Jim, I used my spam email address to complete the removal.

elementary --

FYI -- it works. I removed myself from spokeo a while ago and I've stayed off. And I haven't noticed an increase in spam.

Don't forget to remove yourself from zabasearch, too.

Zillow + Voter File + Google street view to freak you out with a photo of your house.

Everything on me was outdated, but it's all public knowledge anyway, something I could find on pretty much anyone in ten minutes on Google.

Big Brother has been watching for a long time now.

Eh. I wouldn't worry about this too much. I looked myself up. No record of my new married name, and for my old name, it has me as being married to my father.

Choika, I also showed up as married. Though on the family tree, it clearly shows I'm not, so their information isn't consistent. AB, the Google street view of my house freaked me the hell out. It was even creepier because it shows my back fence in the foreground, so it looks even more like a stalker shot.

I fucking hate Google street view because of that, its so creepy.

Don't you have to provide an e-mail address to block yourself? I recall something about this allowing them to associate all your data with an e-mail address.

I looked myself up, and they got the location wrong. That is so not my house. It also shows that I have more money than debt, am better educated than most of my neighbors, and have a cooler car.

Ok, I made that last bit up.

I'm not all that concerned about it. As far as I know, no one is looking for me.

House values (from tax estimation, as well as estimates from comparable real estate) are literally public knowledge.

(For instance, here in Portland values and sizes of homes are easily found on the PortlandMaps GIS site.)

Removing them from Spokeo by asking will never stop the next aggregator from displaying them, or anyone from finding any of them if they actually bother to look.

jj: As others said, there's no reason to imagine anything criminal here. These companies are never acquired by others, because there's basically no margin in it, and all the underlying data is free.

Spokeo isn't adding any value beyond making it slightly easier to find someone, so who'd want to buy them? There's no compelling business case for it.

(Hell, I can't even really imagine criminals bothering with them to find "rich people houses".

They already know what neighborhoods have wealthy-enough people. You can tell just by looking at them - and most thieves don't seem to move around a lot in the town. As habitual criminals of the common sort, they're lazy and not real bright.)