I was in Birmingham, AL and I started getting these really nasty harassing phone calls and texts, so i googled the phone number and was able to get the name on the account. From there I went into my email account and searched for that name and sure enough he had emailed me earlier that day. ( the email was not at all like the the texts he sent. The texts were extremely vulgar! )
So, I put his email and phone number into Spokeo, Spokeo gave me his picture, age, address, and verified his phone number. The value of his home and etc. was probably wrong, but , that info was not important.
Needless to say, I emailed him back a photo of himself, and all of his info Spokeo provided, and well, I never got another text or call etc. again. Which was fantastic, considering when I first googled his phone number, numerous complaints of the same sort of harassment from this number to like 15 other women was the first thing that came up. In there complaints it read that he called for weeks and these women had had it with this mean man!
Spokeo really helped me in this situation! Since then, I have used Spokeo 2 or 3 times when I did not have enough info for a verification process. Out of those few times, only once did it help out. I was able to see myspace and facebook accounts and photo's that slightly confirmed that he was a business owner, but still, its very iffy and I don't trust it!
Even though it helped me once, it is VERY scarey to know that just having a social network can give anyone that stumbles upon this site info that you do not want public! I have put in my info to check what Spokeo knows about me. I am satisfied with how little it knows about me, but still think I will remove my info. Just becareful online! Keep all of your accounts separette, and try to make your info private on all of your accounts!
It's the big Brother of Social Networking!!!!!!!
- sindi.atl
- 05-21-2010, 05:05 AM
- npita
- 05-21-2010, 11:45 AM
Anyone who thinks spokeo is a threat to privacy is going to be in for a rude awakening once he/she realizes that what you can get from spokeo pales in comparison to what anyone can get from lots of other places. In addition to the vast amount of personal information you can get with just a name, if you belong to a social networking site, like facebook, you might as well forget about keeping anything private. Sites like facebook deliberatel store EVERYTHING you've ever posted, including photos, in order to cross reference your information with your friends and sell it to information mining companies.
Your only chance for any privacy is to never use your real name online, never give out ANY personal information online, never use the same handle at different web sites never join a site like facebook whos business model is collecting and cross referening anything you post and insure your real name can never be tied to any of those handles. In other words, you have to sacrifice some convenience for privacy.
Your only chance for any privacy is to never use your real name online, never give out ANY personal information online, never use the same handle at different web sites never join a site like facebook whos business model is collecting and cross referening anything you post and insure your real name can never be tied to any of those handles. In other words, you have to sacrifice some convenience for privacy.