Online “People Search”

Everyone knows what a phone book and web search engine are, but if you were to combine them, you would end up with something like Spokeo:

Spokeo is a search engine specialized in organizing people-related information from phone books, social networks, marketing lists, business sites, and other public sources. Most of this data is publicly available on the Web.

The concept is simple: people tend to post a lot of information about themselves all over social networking sites, so Spokeo gathers it all up to create a record of personal information on you which is freely available for anyone to view.

When I searched my name, the information is only partially accurate, but I don’t have any social networking accounts so the only info it could find on me was probably public records. Still, it is scary to see how much information people willing share with the world, but to each their own.

Try searching your name and share how accurate the results were.

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Dunc
George Orwell would be proud, after all, he wrote the manual for all this didn’t he.
I don’t use any of the ‘social networks’ and I don’t live in USA although I have a couple of accounts that allow me access so I can test how to setup for clients.
I looked up one of my aliases and was surprised to find that it was listed as ‘Male’ aged late 90′s but was also listed as having “Elderly Parents”.
It doesn’t cause me any problems but it is a bit worrying to think how easily incorrect information can be blended with fact, what damage might that do if the information is taken at face value.
From the ‘purchase’ page to get more detailed information, this could maybe be the ‘monetising’ method that the social networks have been looking for.
Steve Stone
I searched for 4 extended family members. They got the name, address, and phone right. The rest of the information was totally wrong.
Paul Dexler
I searched for myself. They got the name and address right, but also put me at my ex-wife’s address. Further details got wierder as they got further away from my home.
http://www.youtube.com/thisisadamb Adam
There’s a reason I don’t use my full name for my public internet personna. “Adam B” is a character, almost exactly like me in real life. But not actually me…
Searching for my real full name comes up with some old and outright wrong information, and I like it that way. Why should someone searching for me have all the right info right away? Let them work for it. Or even better, let them ask _me_ what they want to know and _I_ can decide what correct information they get. If any.
MikeD
You forgot to mention that it ONLY works for the USA!
Now the US is only one of the countries of the world, there are a FEW million of us that aren’t in the US……..so are there search engines that work elsewhere?
I have met some people that think the US is the center of the universe, especially when dealing with the security people……