There has been a lot of discussion over the the past few weeks about a personal data aggregation service named Spokeo.  Just yesterday, I received an email about the site with a subject line containing the word “scary.”

The bottom line with Spokeo is that all the information pulled together with this service is already discoverable on the Internet. Some of the information is factual, the same as what one could find in a phone book. Other information is available through public records sites, such as property records.  Additional information is pulled from social networking sites.

Such services are not new. In fact, most of the data on Spokeo has been available on whitepages.com for years. Every time a new site pops up privacy concerns are raised, like a few years ago with ZabaSearch.

Spokeo’s began back in 2006 as one of the early aggregators of data that was mined from the various social networks. The early vision for the service was as a customizable browser home page that could keep track of friends activities from all those sites. The recent increase in discussion about the service began about a month ago when the latest version was released.  All the chatter is certainly driving a lot of traffic to their site, making “spokeo” among the top Google search terms over the past last few weeks.

While all the information on Spokeo is generally discoverable otherwise, and may be actually inaccurate or old, there is a way to have your information removed:

1. Go to Spokeo.com
2. Search for your name. One can narrow the search for common names by adding a city and state.
3. Select your name to see the information listed
4. Copy the Web site address for your information page
5. Go to their Privacy Page
6. Paste the Web address in the URL field
7. Enter an email address to receive a confirmation message
8. Enter CAPTCHA code shown on the screen
9. Click “Remove Listing”
10. Open the email message sent by Spokeo and click the embedded link
11. Search Spokeo to confirm your record has been removed
12. Remember, all this does is remove your Spokeo profile. All your information is still on the internet – just not pulled together on this site.

Scary? Well, what may be scary is how much of your personal information has been made available though your activities on social networking sites.

-Eric Schnell