But the problem is much more serious. There is a website that has all your personal information, such as: name, address, phone number, age, gender, ethnicity, zodiac (!), relationship, number and name of children, occupation, education, hobbies, home ownership, residence, length of residence, estimated home value, neighborhood, religion, politics, birthday, language, credit estimate, wealth level, mortgage value, income, investments, lifestyle, interests, political affiliation, number of household, home description, it even describes whether there are central heating and swimming pool in your house. Then it gives demographics of your neighborhood and racial ethnicity and economical statistics of your neighbors. You get all this information for free! If you become a member, they claim that they give you more information, such as personal pictures! I assume that when you register to become a member, they will ask you questions, in which would add your profile to their database. It sounds unbelievable, but I urge you to try it at http://www.spokeo.com/ and enter your (or anyone else's) full name. That is all you have to do in order to get all the information about yourself that I mentioned above. There is another link that gives you the option to remove your name from their database, http://www.spokeo.com/privacy, however I recommend that you do not try to remove your name from the site, as you will feed them more data! I tried my name with the first link, and found three similar names in three different locations, one of which was mine (of course I could check data for each one of them). Then I tried the second link to remove my name from the site and they asked me for my e-mail address in order to send me a notification that my name was removed. I naively gave them my e-mail address. Not only they did not remove my name, they have my most recent e-mail address as well!
If you believe your privacy is important, please inform organizations protecting privacy as a constitutional right (such as ACLU) of this site and other similar sites (the above site is for US residents only, there could be sites of this nature for other countries as well). In order to keep your privacy intact:
- Do not trust corporations for keeping your private information confidential. They sell your private information to other companies. Please read privacy statements you receive from banks and other financial institutions. They are long and in very small fonts (fine lines), just to discourage you from reading them! Read them and see what they can do (and they do) with your information.
- Shred your personal information before you throw them in public waste baskets. Someone stole my credit card information I threw away in the post office waste basket, after I checked and discarded my PO Box content.
- Do not forward anyone’s e-mail address. You may know the person you are forwarding an e-mail to, but not the person the recipient of your mail will re-forward the same mail to. Always erase names and address of those on your mail before forwarding it.
- When sending mass e-mail (to more than one person at the same time) use “BCC” instead of “To” or “CC” options.
- Most importantly, the most active organizations trying to invade your privacy is the government. Follow the law and respect the government if you would like to, but do not trust it. Whether you are democrat, republican, or no affiliation, and politically liberal, conservative, or do engage in politics, there are elements in the government who are interested in your private information. In addition to the common policy of the government, all government positions are occupied by people such as you and me. The website I mentioned above, could be receiving their data from a government source.
