I’ve been hearing that there is a new “spooky” website out there called Spokeo that is freaking people out about how much information this site can find about you using just your name or email address. According to the website Smarterware:
Spokeo is the new people search engine that’s freaking users out, because when you “spokeo” yourself there’s a good chance you’ll find your home address, phone number, interests, gender, occupation, wealth level, marital status, photos, and more.
So, I jumped out there and attempted to search on my name, email, and phone numbers and it was creepy to find how awful the results were. Apparently, I don’t exist on any of these social networks that Spokeo indexes. This really surprised me, because I’m not exactly very protective about my identity on social networks and I expected at least something back. But what I got was NOTHING!! I even tried to see if any of my co-bloggers showed up… again, NOTHING!!
As someone that has written about the wealth of personal and company information that is out there on social networks for competitive intelligence research, I’m highly disappointed in the hype behind Spokeo that doesn’t seem to be warranted. If you want to find information on someone, leave Spokeo off your resources and do a simple Google search instead.