You live where, make how much and you're how old?

Last night on the CBS11 news there was a story about an internet site called Spokeo whose tag line is "Not your grandma's phone book." That is because they have consolidated boatloads of information on each of our personal lives from all over the internet. What they do is scour all the social networking sites, public records, email accounts and so on and so on and make all of this available in one convenient place. Granted some of this information is public record anyway but this is way too invasive for me.

I went out to the site and by pulling up my name and email addresses and without even signing up for the reasonably priced (although auto recurring billing) service, I realized the information is frighteningly accurate. Spokeo knew the following about me (some right, some wrong and some unknown):

• My age
• My address (with pictures)
• My email addresses
• Personal pictures of me
• My marital status
  
• Whether I had children or not
• Occupation (fairly accurate)
• Political Party (unknown)
• Religion (unknown)
• Hobbies (fairly accurate)
• Estimated home value (wrong info)
• Zodiac sign
• Education (partially accurate)
• Registered voter
• Home Owner
• Length of ownership (wrong info)
• Quality of neighborhood (wrong info)
• Lifestyles and interests (fairly accurate)
• Play lists of music from Pandora
• Books I have purchased on Amazon
• IP addresses of computers I have used

Spokeo searched through the websites listed below and found there was personal information available on about one third of them. It tells you whether the information about you on each site is an unknown, a likely match or an exact match.

• Amazon
• Bebo
  
• BizShark
  
• Blogger
• Buzznet
• Digg
• Facebook
  
• Flickr
• Flickr Group
• Flixster
• Fotolog
• Friendster
• Goodreads
• Hi5
• iLike
• Last.fm
• LinkedIn
• LiveJournal
• Multiply
• MySpace
• MyYearbook
• Netlog
• Pandora
• PhotoBucket
• Picasa
• PictureTrail
• Slide
• Stumbleupon
• Tagged
• Target
• Twitter
• Upcoming
• Veoh
• Vox
• Web Results
• WebShots
• Windows Live
• Wretch
• Xanga
• Yelp
• You tube

You may remove the information about yourself from the Spokeo website by clicking http://www.spokeo.com/privacy but it warns you that it does not remove the information from the internet all together. I think it is important to pay the additional money to see which websites they have used to gather your profile. You will then be able to click on that site, log in under your user name and password and go to either the profile settings, account settings or privacy settings to un-check anything that allows your profile or private information to be broadcast to 3rd party applications or publicly.

Interestingly the site that gets the most publicity about their privacy settings, Facebook had not released any information about me. However, Amazon, Myspace, Youtube, Google, Bebo, Yahoo, Twitter, Picasa, Blogger, MSN, Digg and Pandora had. It appears that virtually every site has its default privacy settings set to release your information.

I realize that we are going to have to embrace the fact that our lives are now a window to the world but you are going to have to look really hard to see through my window unless I choose to open the blinds.