I have a fairly unique name. Anyway 5 years ago I was on a date, met the girl online. She started asking me about places I had lived... and she just knew way too much about me. She confessed she had paid like $20 to look me up on one of those extended search services before the date. There was no second date. Totally creeped me out... but I did get the name of the service she used, and when I got home I ran a search on myself to see what all was there.
What's worse than all the information being out there, or parallel I guess, is that the shitty service had a bunch of information wrong. It said I lived in a state where I co-signed a lease for my sister (and since I have the same last name as my sister the service drew the conclusion we were married), it said that I still owned a home in yet another state (I had sold it years before)... It also returned my year-by-year income (most of which was fairly accurate), court records (even from when I was a little kid showing up at my parents' divorce hearing), and the exact amount I still owed on my house. No clue how they got all that shit.
Around that time I went looking for ways to purge it all, I stumbled across this post:
Here we are, 5 years later... I can say... a few less scammy sites show up when you search for me... but on the whole not really much impact. A bunch of information these sites have is still wrong, and a lot of the sites... even if you go through all the trouble of opting out... they only honor the opt-out for a year.
I asked my lawyer if there was a way, how do celebrities and such keep their records out of these people's hands... and his response was, "You probably have to contact each site and pay then to take you off..." At which point I decided to cheer if anyone ever fire-bombed the offices of Radaris or Spokeo or Yatedo or any of the other shit-information sites.
We need laws that make it legal for us to all kick the CEO of these companies in the nuts -- one good solid kick each. Freedom of information, all that... necessary for democracy... and it's just a short hop from there over to aggregation services... but we should at least ensure that people who want to profit off eroding privacy shouldn't be able to reproduce.
To be clear, just in case anyone reading does not understand, this would have no impact as data is now routinely stored at multiple, geographically disparate data centers run by disparate companies within completely distinct legal jurisdictions, as contracted by distinct legal entities, and these are increasingly all kept secret via services like Cloudflare, corporate service agents, DNS privacy services, international accountants and lawyers.
So... don't go getting firebombing ideas. Instead, take your pyro inklings out through the retro game Pyro ][ in which our protagonist begins by burning down the IRS - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pyro+2+abandonware
A large scale, sustained global atmospheric thermonuclear barrage might do the trick - generate a wave of electromagnetic pulses and fry all the electronics on the planet.
Your ire is probably misplaced. It should be with the laws that make most of that information public in the first place. (Although there are good reasons to make various information public as well.) Yes, it's easier to access that information with a quick search than in the past but that's the reality of public information in this age.)
But there is a creepiness factor. As someone who is fairly visible publicly and deals with a lot of PR people etc., there's a fine line between finding areas of common interest/conversation starters and we ran a creepy background check on you.
There is a database of mortgages, I forgot what it was called though, that's how they know what you owed on your house.
Most of that stuff is pretty easy to find on local records, it's just a dumb aggregator, they are getting the information from elsewhere.
If I had time I'd be able to find 80% of that information on you now. If I had access to a few nonpublic databases (like a PI would) I'd have access to everything. And since I am a smart human not a dumb machine id probably be able to tell most of the innacurate information was inaccurate.
Im aware it could be done. I just think anyone who does it deserves a swift kick to the nuts.
I could create plastic rice and sell it... but I'd be a horrible person for doing so. Just like these people that created the aggregators. Pathetic waste of life ass hats... can't think of anything good for society... so they shit on it.
> anyone who does it deserves a swift kick to the nuts.
Let's say you want to buy a house and apply for mortgage. The bank can either look at your credit history to determine your probability of default, or not look at your credit history and assume your probability of default is the same as US average. The bank uses this probability and prime rate to decide what interest rate to offer you.
If you paid your bills on time in the past, your credit history would be clean and you'll get a better rate.
OK, joking aside... Sure... the bank has that info. Presumably the bank had to go through special screening and training to get access to it. I'm OK with that. One step better, it would be nice to have notification whenever any person or institution queried my info... but at least they have some level of screening.
Huge difference between that, and just throwing all the information out there to the wind. Certainly your insurance rates would go down if all your health info were made public and the insurance provider was allowed to factor that in, right? It's creepy, it makes the world a worse place for existing.
I guess what's nice is that when someone does a search, they probably know most of these sites aren't all that accurate to begin with... But my comments were more around how it would be nice to stop the spread of some things... companies that work to make a buck eroding our privacy for starters. I could set up a truck on the street in front of your house... document everything about you for a few months... it's creepy.
On that note, the way to kill these sites off would be to just have Google de-list these sites. Now, I get that Google won't actually de-list sites... but treating them like the scammers they are would be a good change the the SERP ranking algorithm.
> Presumably the bank had to go through special screening and training to get access to it.
No, not really. They just have to ask you if it's OK preform that query from a Consumer Reporting Agency (CRA) and have regulations around informing you about the sources they used to make decisions. Same for any 'background check' company. But if you want to participate in society you're going to have to authorize these sorts of searches... There's not a whole lotta choice.
In the US The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) regulates how the CRAs use that information.
I'm no expert, but I believe the FCRA only applies if the information is being used to make credit, insurance, employment, housing, etc. decisions. It doesn't apply for personal curiosity. That's why those sites say "you agree not to use this information for employment, housing purposes, etc." When you use them.
It's probably more useful to read the FCRA rather than listening to me though.
> your insurance rates would go down if all your health info were made public and the insurance provider was allowed to factor that in, right?
It's already happening, the only difference being that it's the people rather than insurance providers that make those decisions. Healthy young people do not buy insurance (because they will pay more in premiums than amount of healthcare they consume), premiums go up because average remaining customer needs more healthcare, etc. In the limit premiums are sky high and nobody has insurance. That's why universal health care makes sense.
The key difference is that people have little control over their health, but a lot more control over how much they work, how much they spend, and whether they pay their bills on time.
Credit bureaus and companies like Axciom or DataTree collect, keep and sell tons of data.
At the very least you should request your credit report (it's free if you don't want FICO score) and check that everything in it is correct. This is not the last time someone pulled a background check on you.
What's worse than all the information being out there, or parallel I guess, is that the shitty service had a bunch of information wrong. It said I lived in a state where I co-signed a lease for my sister (and since I have the same last name as my sister the service drew the conclusion we were married), it said that I still owned a home in yet another state (I had sold it years before)... It also returned my year-by-year income (most of which was fairly accurate), court records (even from when I was a little kid showing up at my parents' divorce hearing), and the exact amount I still owed on my house. No clue how they got all that shit.
Around that time I went looking for ways to purge it all, I stumbled across this post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/j1mit/how_to_re...
I filled out every opt-out form I could find.
Here we are, 5 years later... I can say... a few less scammy sites show up when you search for me... but on the whole not really much impact. A bunch of information these sites have is still wrong, and a lot of the sites... even if you go through all the trouble of opting out... they only honor the opt-out for a year.
I asked my lawyer if there was a way, how do celebrities and such keep their records out of these people's hands... and his response was, "You probably have to contact each site and pay then to take you off..." At which point I decided to cheer if anyone ever fire-bombed the offices of Radaris or Spokeo or Yatedo or any of the other shit-information sites.
We need laws that make it legal for us to all kick the CEO of these companies in the nuts -- one good solid kick each. Freedom of information, all that... necessary for democracy... and it's just a short hop from there over to aggregation services... but we should at least ensure that people who want to profit off eroding privacy shouldn't be able to reproduce.
Seems like there was an update to that post.
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/31u84n/how_to_r...