I recently got a flurry of paniced emails from friends about the website Spokeo.com.1 It wasn’t the first I had heard of the site – my father-in-law is the king of internet scams, rumors, urban legends, and general Chicken Littlesque freak-outs, so much so that I have stopped my years-long efforts to correct him when he forwards such nonsense and now simply hit the delete key on any email coming from him with the word “Forward” in the subject line. This latest rash of hysteria-laden correspondence though was coming from my very own peeps – gals I had always considered to be level-headed and reasonable people – so I sort of feel obliged to throw in my two cents and try to talk them off of their nonsensical ledges that they had placed themselves on.
One friend stated in horror, “They know where I live and even show an aerial map of the area.” Oh, you mean that same map that your friend visiting from out of town pulled up on her GPS so she could make her way through the rabbit warren of a neighborhood to visit you. Oh my, very spooky that Spokeo. It is public record people! And it is a nice convenience that we all enjoy these days to boot. But what about the fact that they know I am married? Public record. When I was born? Public record. My telephone number? Public record, unless you have an unlisted number, of course.
And if you think for one second that Spokeo is the only one out there with this dirt on you, well then I have some lovely beachfront property in Omaha that I would love to sell you. It once was simply much more onerous to come up with this type of information on people. To get a phone number or address you had to look it up in the phone book. Remember those? (Okay, if you are less than 28 years old, you probably have no idea what I am talking about.) To determine real estate values, you had to do the leg work wading through reams of tax records at the local county courthouse. Now it has become a one-stop shop if you are willing to pay for that convenience, which by the way will cost you $34/year on Spokeo. Of course there are many other online vendors who would like to sell this information about you, and might just undercut that price. Try, for example: Intelius, zabasearch, peoplefinders, peoplelookup, lifehacker, peopleferret, 411.com, whitepages.com, yada yada yada, and the list goes on and on and on.
Sure, you can fear Spokeo and request that your information be removed from their site, but to assure that your info is not available on hundreds more sites just like it now and in the future, you will need contact them all. But do understand that the underlying online information from whence they culled their information, much of it which is public record, is still going to be available. Unless you decide to live like the boy in the bubble or otherwise completely divorce yourself from civilization by moving to the mountains of Montana and becoming a self-sustaining Unabomber type – although if you will recall, that didn’t really work out for Ted either – then you just need to welcome yourself to our brave new world.
That which is not public record is often simply automated guesswork by these third-party vendors, and it may or may not be correct. We all know and understand that. Another friend seemed appalled that Spokeo had listed her hobbies as travel and cooking (which by the way they are), but it doesn’t take a crystal ball to determine these types of things. Magazine and catalog subscription companies sell information all the time and have done so for decades. About that high-end knife set that you purchased for the sister-in-law as a Christmas gift at Williams-Sonoma, guess what, that likely identified you as having a cooking hobby even if you set off the smoke alarm in your kitchen when you make toast! And the fact that you have an account on Orbitz and regularly use it – well, duh. (Feel free to intercalate your own name and personal specs here to jump on the panic bandwagon.)
While we are talking about inaccurate information on the web, let’s talk about Zillow.com, which wins for corny verbage with its “Zestimate® (pronounced ZEST-ti-met, rhymes with estimate) home valuation [which] is Zillow's estimated market value” and is ripe for interesting inaccuracies. If you really want to fret, Zillow has a “Claim Your Home” feature, which allows you to go in and correct info it has on your home – in other words, perhaps its Zestimate is wrong! – and while there you can “claim your home.” Wait a minute, what if someone else claims my home? Do they get to move in? Do they pay the mortgage and property taxes? Do I really care what Zillow thinks of my home, who owns it, or its value? Not really.
I also love when someone’s immediate knee-jerk reaction is “I am seriously thinking about dumping facebook for good!” As much as I would like to make Mark Zuckerburg responsible for all my woes, it just isn’t so. You willingly put information online about yourself with Facebook , Google+, Linkedin, and Twitter, but at least with those products you do have some control of who actually sees it. I am pretty parsimonious with my Facebook information outside of my chosen circle of friends, which do not include Spokeo or anyone affiliated with Spokeo.
Let’s be real for a moment, companies truly have no discernable interest in your life outside of what they can sell you, it is called targeted marketing. And when you think about it, wouldn’t you rather have ads about crocheted art or puppies, if that is what interests you, pop onto your screen rather than more Viagra commercials (unless of course that interests you, and I am in no way judging here). The likelihood that anything more ominous than targeted marketing is going on with my Facebook page is relatively slim.
My Starbucks app on my phone means that Starbucks, and probably the half dozen other companies they share – meaning “sell” – that information with, can track my coffee purchases. Using the app also means that I get 70 cents2 off each cup of coffee that I buy. It’s a trade off. If that means that my “venti-extra-hot-skinny-cinnamon-dolce-latte-habit” winds up on TMZ tonight, well, I am okay with that. Otherwise, I guess I will just have to get my 15 minutes of fame some other way.
1 I was humored that the friend who started this panic attack about Spokeo found the site because she had heard a rumor that a former boss had gotten married and was trying to confirm that. So I guess that means that it is okay to see other people’s personal information online, but it is “disturbing” if it is your own.
2 Quite frankly, I am more concerned about the disappearance of the cent mark in English usage. When I went to put it in this piece, there was no such symbol on my Word software. Really? Available monetary symbols included Franc, Euro, Lira, Peseta, Dong, RMB, Yen and Sheqel (what?), but no lowly cent sign. How about we angst over that instead!
