Slashdot Mirror
Spokeo Fined $800K By FTC For Marketing Its Services To Employers
nonprofiteer writes "Spokeo was one of the first public-facing person-profiling companies to attract the ire of those profiled. Taglined 'not your grandmother's phonebook,' it offers up profiles pulled from public records, social networking sites, etc, including your address, worth of your home, who's in your family, your estimated wealth, your hobbies and interests, and more. People freaked out when they first discovered it. Apparently, the company was selling reports to employers, but not following principles set forth by the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The Federal Trade Commission is fining them $800,000. FTC also chastises them for writing fake positive reviews around the Web."
I typed in my own name. They had nothing on me. They found a few other people of the same name, but they were clearly not me.
In some circumstances that can be much much worse.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
How did you get through so many Anonymous Cowards...so quickly?!
$800,000 and a "don't do that again, or at least don't get caught" is a slap on the wrist in this type of market.
It's fine like these that makes me sick. With the amount of money these guys make there probably laughing.
I can't imagine anyone using spokeo for anything important, as their info is not even close to being correct. When I checked my profile a year or 2 ago (When you could see it all without paying), it had me living in a million dollar home (off by more than an order of magnitude), with a several hobbies which weren't even the slightest bit correct (knitting, and horses I think), and had someone the same age as my mother living in the house, despite the fact that she never lived there, had any mail delivered there, or anything. I don't remember the rest, but category after category I was reading it thinking "wow, I barely even know myself".
They found me. They found the address I lived at for a few months, but not the one I've been at for a few years. My sister's name is right, but she's apparently 40 years older than she really is, and exists in five different places at once. My father's name is "Father", and my mother's name is "Mother". They're male and female, respectively.
I'm unimpressed.
Several years ago, I told a friend on IRC that I could track him down in real life. He didn't believe me. I went through our chat logs, found his first and last real names, and the city he lived in. I then used a plain old phone book (you know, like grandma has) to call his potential family members. I eventually got hold of his mother's catering company, and she passed on a greeting for me. My information, discovered through plain old communication, was more accurate than what this thing has.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
You're not the one from NY?
http://www.spokeo.com/search?q=Anonymous+Coward&s2=t24
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I took a look at the website. From what I can tell, anything beyond partial phone number, possible street-level addresses and bogus value, possible relatives probably just to confirm the match... pretty much everything else is a sample of what a report would look like. The interests, for example, all have question marks. The random names I typed in have very similar interests to yours.
Unless you gave the bastards money?
I vote based on politicians' actions, unless contrary to my preconceptions. Often wrong, never uncertain. #iamthe99%
You don't get out much, do you? Facebook sells your information. Always has. Always will. It was in the agreement you agreed to when you signed up. People have been talking about it for years. Where have you been?
I don't respond to AC's.
yeah, that site is not very accurate at all.
I have a fairly unique last name. There are only 2 distinct families with it in the entire US, and the other family has yet to use my first name for one of their sons. Therefore any search for my first and last name always comes up with me (discouting large lists of names where the first and last name don't actually appear together). Somehow this site has me living in 4 different states, and one of them i've never even visited. In one of the states where I went to school it lists only the first address (out of 7) that I used when I first moved to that state. And in the state I grew up it claims my parents had my last name, which because of divorce and a second marriage they did not.
I have to say that Spokeo isn't worth the digital ink it is printed with
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Apparently, the company was selling reports to employers, but not following principles set forth by the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Call me cynical, but it sounds like their real crime was not being one of the Big Three credit agencies, probably do worse stuff, more often.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
I didn't bother to go through the "removal" process. I hope it works for you. I did go back to the site and took a closer look and it has 6 entries for me from what I can tell - Some old stuff, some more recent stuff and what not. Different old phone numbers, addresses, etc. As to who uses it, mainly uninformed people who believe the information is correct, probably. To me it's been a game for a long time. For example - Four Facebook profiles, each with different information but very close to same name (I don't even use Facebook other than for posting links to some of my web sites). You can pretty much devalue data mining if you want to by planting stuff all around. In the late 1990's I used to plant stuff on newsgroups, for example.
You can screw them up if you want to. There are lots of blogs, forums and such where you can spread mis-information. A VPN account or two is nice to have especially if the service gives you multiple locations in multiple countries you can VPN to and surf from where ever. I can VPN to a Hong Kong server, for example, and browse from there. A bit of latency, but not a big deal. TOR can be put to good use when spreading mis-information, too. I use 5 different browsers on this computer alone (use a browser and clear the cache and the cookies and then close it, then use another browser for a while - Rinse and Repeat), and since I work on the internet I have 3 different ISPs/providers (I need the redundancy so they're a business expense) for a variety of IPs (but VPNs and TOR are better for that). In my case, having been doing web sites for over 15 years, I've planted a lot of fake information around over the years.
On the other hand, I'm in my 60's and don't really care what info they come up with. It *is* admittedly entertaining to see some of the stuff companies like this come up with. When you're a bit bored, just sign up on some forums, make some extra Facebook accounts and stuff like that. Blog posts are another good place to put mis-information. The more mis-information you get out there the more unreliable anything a site like this can come up with is.
Well, with that in mind, I think I'll VPN to a provider in Britain and set up anther Facebook account and maybe another Twitter account. One can never have too many fake accounts!
Looking at the site, there is a 'remove' option in the privacy link.
http://www.spokeo.com/privacy
I wonder if it actually removes you or if they just add your ip to the list of info. i.e. "Likes using Firefox"