Can a Person Know if You Googled Them.on Mylife.com
On the Spider web, your life is an open up book. Typing a name or telephone number into one of the many costless online directories may disclose a person's age, previous cities of residence, and the names of shut relatives.
If y'all're willing to pay a few dollars, y'all may be able to observe the person'southward date of birth, current and past addresses, photos, videos, estimated annual income, the value of their residence, and social network profiles (although much of this information is available for complimentary likewise). Fee-based services also check public records for the person's criminal and civil cases, liens, aliases, lawsuits, and bankruptcies.
There are enough of legitimate reasons for looking that securely into someone's background, including pre-employment checks and vetting potential business organization partners. Rather than pay for the information, I decided to come across what I could observe out near myself and others by searching five complimentary Web people-search services: PhoneNumber.com, MyLife, 123people.com, Intelius, and Spokeo.
This post looks at the results of my searches of the first two of these Web directories; tomorrow I'll draw what I found in the other three directories, and afterward this week, I'll examine ways to manage and control your personal information on the Web.
There was enough of information almost me in these directories, but a great amount of the data in their entries for me was outdated or only patently wrong. And while near Web directories let you request that your personal information be removed from their databases, at that place's no guarantee the services won't just collect the information all over once again in the future--at least until there's a "do not collect" registry similar to the Federal Trade Commission's Do Non Phone call registry.
Search by proper name, phone number, or accost
Searching my proper noun at PhoneNumber.com returned 82 entries, none of them me. But my name did appear when I searched my home phone number on the site'south contrary-phone-lookup page. And both my name and my wife's name were returned when I entered our home accost on the site (with no phone number).
PhoneNumber.com doesn't offer fee-based people-information services, only the site is loaded with ads, including a total-screen flash animation that Firefox blocked. Make sure you take your browser's pop-upwardly blocker activated earlier you visit PhoneNumber.com. Firefox blocked several popular-ups when I tested the site, and I believe at least one pop-upwards advertising got through the browser'due south advertisement defense.
Apart from the directory's advertisement overload, PhoneNumber.com didn't reveal much about me that I wouldn't expect to find in a public directory, particularly when compared with the degree of personal data disclosed by the other free online directories I tested.
Merchandise your individual info for "free" access?
1 of the prevalent advertisers on PhoneNumber.com is MyLife, which is virtually noteworthy for its many attempts to convince yous to surrender your personal information in commutation for access to everyone else's personal information. The site'due south first pop-upwards appears almost immediately, prompting y'all to register by inbound your gender, name, electronic mail address, appointment of birth, and ZIP code.
In exchange, the service offers to permit you "control your contour and craft your online image," according to the MyLife Terms and Conditions folio. The site's terms also state that "y'all are licensing to MyLife.com and our third-party service providers any 'content' y'all provide through or to MyLife.com and the service they offer."
MyLife has the correct to "alter, brandish, distribute, and create new material using such content on MyLife.com'southward sites for the promotion and marketing of our services and the operation of our system." In other words, MyLife owns whatever information you share with the site.
The MyLife Privacy Policy states that MyLife operates nine other people-directory sites. Anyone over the historic period of 12 can sign up for a MyLife site, and while the site encourages you to give up your personal information almost immediately, its privacy policy warns confronting sharing too much.
Just a few paragraphs earlier in the privacy policy, withal, the company readily admits that it will use and share the information you provide with unnamed third parties. MyLife and its "partners" will also send you lot e-mail and postal mail unless you specifically opt out. The site offers to search your contact listing and transport everyone in it an invitation to bring together MyLife.
Your personally identifiable information will exist shared with "third-party co-marketing partners," co-ordinate to the privacy policy, although MyLife claims it doesn't share personally identifiable information with other members or nonpartner 3rd parties without your consent. MyLife says it will notify you of the request and allow you accept or decline information technology.
MyLife offers free access to information, photos, and profiles of everyone else in the site's directories. You can as well find out who is searching for you and what sites your contacts are visiting, according to the service. Information technology isn't articulate whether your contacts know they're sharing their Web history.
Without registering, the site showed my name, age, metropolis, partial phone number, two previous cities of residence, and the names and ages of half-dozen "friends & family." These included four close relatives and two strangers. The site promised to reveal my full accost and telephone number to anyone who registers.
The directory'due south dwelling folio offers to reveal "who'due south looking for yous" for free, merely when y'all enter a name, age, and ZIP code, you're prompted to provide your e-mail address and date of birth earlier you lot're able to view any of the information. In my book, exchanging that personal information for the right to view the information makes the transaction anything merely costless.
There'due south a lot to dislike about this site, not to the lowest degree of which is the pop-upwardly that appears when you lot try to go out--ane final desperate attempt to get you to supply its privacy-busting directories with your personal information. Adding insult to injury, when yous attempt to remove your personal information from the site, information technology opens a grade requesting even more data about you.
MyLife clearly can't be trusted with my personal information, but to request that it be removed, I must supply the site with even more than personal information. What'south wrong with this picture? In fact, it may practice no good to asking that the information be removed, because the site could simply collect it over again from whatever public source information technology tapped for information technology in the offset place. (I'll hash out this conundrum in more particular later this calendar week in a mail on Spider web reputation-protection services.)
Tomorrow: Delving into the free directories at 123people.com, Intelius, and Spokeo.
Source: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/privacy-check-what-web-directories-know-about-you/
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