You might be surprised how easy it is to find out:
- your home addresses- for the past twenty years
- names and ages of spouses, siblings, parents and more
- much, much more
Today I stumbled across two search engines, Zabasearch.com and Peoplefinders.com. I am sure there are many others. One quick search on peoplefinders and I saw my name, age (my age is right in one spot, OLDER in another- now that is just wrong!), and a listing of my possibly relatives + their ages. Pay a small fee and you can get home phone numbers, home addresses, and even my exact birthdate (which thankfully might be wrong in at least one spot!)
How did so much of my so called private information get out “there� This information was always available, but it took a lot of time searching at county records offices, and of course you had to know which county to search in. This information is now compiled on the grand old world wide web. It pulls from public records for property ownership, births, deaths, marriage, divorces and criminal records. It also must pull from other records such as utilities, because it seems to have records of addresses for past rentals I have had as well.
What really scares me is that places like banks often use your mother’s maiden name as a security question. Guess what- now EASY to find. In my business, I am in the public eye. I want people to find me, my website, blog and my office. BUT, I don’t want them to find my house, or the names of my children. And for those of you who don’t put yourself out in the public eye- think about your privacy. The people looking for the names of our children are probably not the people we want to hear from.
There is an option to “opt out†on both of the sites listed above, but it seems like you have to provide a huge amount of information. To opt out, they ask for: any aliases and A.K.A.’s , complete current address, complete former addresses going back 20 years, full birth date, and more. I am not sure I want to provide this company MORE information than they might already have. Maybe I am being paranoid. The reality is that I can’t opt out of every online data broker. If someone wants the information, they will get it from someone.
Visit Privacyrights.org for more information on privacy rights and issues. They also provide a list of all online data brokers you can opt out of, and a long list of those that you cannot.