lack of privacy on the internet

[firecat]

Two people came to my door yesterday and asked for me by my (legal) name. They claimed to be from the company that I buy landline phone service from (AT&T) and were trying to upsell me on some more services and generally fishing for information. I told them I was happy with the services I have.

I wondered if it was a scam, but I thought "they have my name, and I don't think my full name is publicly associated with my address and phone number."

I told the OH about it and he pointed me here:

http://neighbors.whitepages.com/

I entered an address in my neighborhood. It had full names and telephone numbers associated with every house on my block.

So I take note that anyone can look up my address and associate it with my legal name. Supposedly you can remove your info from this particular site, but it would probably just pop up somewhere else.

Comments

[megwrites]

Holy crap! That site is seriously scary and not entirely accurate. For one, it thinks that my parents still live at my old place in Queens, and it has my stepmom's maiden and married name. But it doesn't have me at ANY of my current residences.

My name is not on any of the addresses I've put in that I've lived at in the last ten years, but it still lists me as living in the house I grew up in a LOOOONG time ago. This tells me that they're mining data from not so legitimate places because the only things that would've had me listed as living there would have been things like school registration, medical records, and any mail I got sent while living there which mostly consisted of birthday cards and stuff.

I am now seriously pissed off at this. This is like a stalker's damn dream come true.

BTW

[megwrites]

Some searching finds that they're getting their info from County Clerks' Offices. Or at least that's what people are reporting they've been told by representatives of the site.

re: lack of privacy on the internet

[betonica]

Not very accurate for me. I put in my address and it had "no info found." For "neighbors" it listed only one, two houses away to the south (in the next town & also 3/4 mile away) and nothing to the north, where most of the houses are.

I note that the neighbor listed probably has street delivery of her mail, whereas the rest of us all use a post office box. We still don't have rural delivery in my town, but we pretty much like it that way - if we didn't meet up at the post office occasionally we'd never see each other.

The aerial photograph is from, I think, the late fall of 2010. It is not very high-res and is not Google's most recent image (summer of 2011).

Even the local college, which gets FedEx and UPS and other stuff delivered but has a PO Box for USPS, is listed as "no info found" despite having 50-100 employees and an average of about 300 students at any given time.

It doesn't list me at my Chicago address (2000-2005) but does list the owners who live in the same building, as well as two other names I don't know (it's a six-unit apartment building). Other places I've lived do not have my info, either, although it's been quite some time since I was at any of them. I'm pleased that I'm apparently not in their database, although they might have me somewhere I haven't ever lived.

So. Very outdated and haphazard information, apparently based on postal addresses.

I wonder if it's based on the reverse-lookup listings? I haven't checked those out in ages, but they used to be available in big books in the library - you could look up an address (or, I think, a phone number) and get the name associated with it. It's probably electronic and online, by now.

[amadi]

That is so bogus. It's really scary, and clearly not just county clerk information, because it has the name of tenants in houses rather than owners, and there's no county database of things like that here. They're data mining elsewhere for this info.

Fortunately, my name is not attached to my home. Unfortunately, that makes it look as though my mother is a woman living alone here. It also shows my neighbor and her daughter as the only occupants of their home, and neither of their husbands, making them seem more vulnerable than they are, and consequently making them targets of the sorts who would use this info for unscrupulous purposes.

The thing that makes me most angry about this kind of thing is that when you complain about it, there are always people who say that it's paranoid, that this is information that people can find if they do records searches, etc. But this just makes it too damned easy.

[apis_mellifera]

I poked around a bit and discovered that one of their sponsors has me listed with an also known as where my last name is misspelled in a way that only Chase Bank misspelled it back when I had a credit card with them. Our new car's loan is through Chase and when I tried to enroll for online payments I had to spend half an hour on the phone with them because they had an address for me that I hadn't lived at in nearly 20 years. And phone numbers that were similarly old. Sigh.

[megwrites]

Yeah. After I posted that reply I kept searching. They use a number of other data mining companies and such to get this info.

I just keep seeing the possibilities for someone to look up, say, a person they've abused who is trying to leave and stay away from them, or a stalker who wants to come after someone.

Not to mention the danger of inaccurate information (of which there is much). Some angry asshat goes looking to do something nasty to someone and ends up defacing the wrong person's car/house/etc or goes in guns blazing into the wrong home because they think that their target lives there.

*shudder*.

God but we need way better privacy laws in the U.S. Badly.

Re: BTW

[firecat]

Thanks for reporting on your research.

Re: lack of privacy on the internet

[firecat]

as where my last name is misspelled in a way that only Chase Bank misspelled it back when I had a credit card with them.

Woooow.

[eggcrack]

That is really scary. D:

[graymalkin13.livejournal.com]

Awhile back I googled my name and the names of various family members, just to see what would happen. On one website, my parents' names and address were listed, along with their "associates": my name and the names of all of my siblings, including the ones who don't live with my parents. I can't find that site right now, so maybe it's been taken down.

I just googled my own name and I'm on that whitepages site (along with my address, of course), as well as MyLife and some other stalker-friendly sites.

You can never be paranoid enough when it comes to the interwebs.

[klwalton.livejournal.com]

I'm reasonably certain this is public information. I note that our names are listed in association with our address, but our phone number is not. Our phone number is unlisted, which may be why.

[jodawi.livejournal.com]

Laurie's ex-boyfriend who lives in Colorado and presumably has never lived in Seattle is listed at our house.

About as bad as some of the album covers Apple (or other software i forget) decided should be applied to various pieces of music.

[firecat]

About as bad as some of the album covers Apple (or other software i forget) decided should be applied to various pieces of music.

Oh yeah, don't get me started...

[lcohen]

they have my name but it's misspelled. not that that helps very much.