So a friend of mine posted this on Facebook today:
There's a site called Spokeo.com that's a new online USA phone book w/personal info from pics on FB or web, your approx credit score, home value, income, age, etc. You can remove yourself by first searching for yourself. Then click on your name and copy the URL. Go back to the main page and scroll to the bottom and click on the Privacy button to remove yourself. This is real checked it out myself.
I went to the site, searched myself, and sure enough, there I am. You can search by name or by email address. I found a lot more about myself when I searched by name; you might have to try different variations of your name, like with and without your middle initial, for example. But it's there: cell phone number, facebook, map to my house, address, everything. The pictures they had of me weren't me, and I don't know where they came from, so their information is sketchy, but it's still too much.
I ran Snopes on the site and their assessment is that it's a data mining site and that once you actually give them your email, which you have to do to remove your name, you've confirmed your email address and they can sell it. By that point I'd already removed my name from Spokeo. I went back to Spokeo to see if my name was still there, and it isn't.
I'm not sure if I did the right thing by deleting myself or not. Snopes says it's like Wack a Mole - it'll pop up somewhere else. Probably true. We live in a scary time, folks!
