7. People-Search Websites
“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”
—JOHN LYDON OF THE SEX PISTOLS
In February 2012, a man in Minneapolis stormed into a Target store with a fistful of coupons that had been sent to his house for pregnancy- and baby-related items. He was angry that Target was sending inappropriate mail to his house, where he lived with his teenage daughter.
Of course, the clerks at Target had no idea what he was talking about. But after going back home and talking to his daughter, he later apologized to the Target employees because it turned out that his daughter was, in fact, pregnant. Like most big companies, Target had created a profile of his daughter and tracked her, which is how it figured out that she was pregnant before her own father did.
Here’s the deal. Every detail of your life—what you buy, where you go, whom you love—is being extracted from the Internet, bundled up, and sold by data-mining companies. That information comes from the websites you visit, the stuff you buy, your Facebook photos, your credit cards, your points and miles accounts, the music you listen to, the videos you watch online, the surveys you fill out, and the magazines you subscribe to. Add it all up, and you’ve got coupons about your supposedly private health status being sent to your home.
The sad truth is that when you visit Jezebel to read an article, you may think that only Jezebel is collecting your data. What you may not realize is that every ad on that page is also attaching a tracking code to you and collecting information about you.
BUT I’M NOT THAT INTERESTING
The information that you post on Facebook, no matter how boring or useless it seems to you, can make you a marketing target. Your bundle of information is sold to advertisers for about two-fifths of a cent as part of an enormous, multibillion-dollar industry that centers on the collection and sale of you. You are the product. And business is booming.
Shady data dealing has been around since the birth of junk mail, telemarketing, and credit companies, but the laws designed to keep us safe haven’t kept pace with the Internet age. Tech-savvy businesses have realized that they can collect your data with abandon (even skimming it from apps on your phone that leak user data when they shouldn’t).
Your personal and private info is worth more money when it’s accurate. Unfortunately, many companies that buy and sell your information don’t care about accuracy, as long as they can make even a little money off you as a product. Just as there are few legal safeguards to protect our privacy and our control over private information, the companies buying and selling your data also have not been held liable under any laws or accountable to any standards when it comes to protecting the security of your private information. They may share it to make money, or they may get hacked and your information may be stolen. This means your privacy is all up to you.
This can cause problems for you down the line in different ways, like wrong information ending up on your credit reports, or when you’re dealing with identity theft. More and more, it can harm your reputation when wrong information is shared about you online, and it can harm your ability to get a job if a possible employer does an online lookup and gets bad information. The data dealers make plenty of mistakes, but I think the biggest one they’ve ever made is thinking that you don’t care about your privacy.
Advertisers and ad brokers want to make sure they’re getting their money’s worth for their clients when they place ads on websites. They’ll pay extra to have their ads seen by website visitors who are more likely to buy their clients’ products. In some instances, the person being tracked on the website will be in a block of tracked people whose information is being auctioned off to the highest bidder.
In order to know whether a website visitor is likely to click on a diaper ad, for example, both the website owner and the advertiser want to have as much personal information as possible. They want to be sure a diaper ad is seen by the exact person who needs diapers at the exact moment they see the ad. This means that for online marketers, the more personal the information gets and the more accurate it is, the more valuable it is.
To aim ads at pregnant customers, Target gathers information from its baby shower registry and combines it with a website user’s shopping habits and ordering information, like their address and phone number. The registry tells Target not only that a user is pregnant but also when her due date is. If there’s no registry, Target can still look at your shopping history to predict what’s going on in your life. All of this adds up to a profile that is worth a lot of money, considering how much more Target can get people to spend if the company puts the right ads and coupons in front of them at the right time.
The same thing goes for ads placed on social media websites and other websites that make money off of selling targeted advertising. If Facebook figures out a user is pregnant, getting married, or any number of things we usually consider pretty personal, Facebook then takes some of the information it has on you and sells it to advertisers, who then buy ads on Facebook.
Some websites sell your contact information to advertisers and partners so those people can email you. Bottom line: if you want to keep personal things private, it’s a good idea to read privacy policies before you sign up for anything. And if you do sign up—whether it’s a mailing list, a shopper profile on a store’s website, or a social media account—go into your account settings ASAP and make sure you’re okay with what the company can and can’t do with your information. Unfortunately, most companies limit the amount of your own information that you can control, and getting your info for free to sell later feeds their profits. Google is a prime example.
THE DANGERS LURKING IN PEOPLE-FINDER SITES
People-search services like Intelius, LexisNexis, Spokeo, WhitePages, BeenVerified, and DOBSearch get their information through public records, while secondary sites aggregate this information by data mining these sites. All of these sites are problems for your privacy. This is because they provide the general public with a dangerous amount of personal information about you. They offer to sell this information under the guise of promising to reunite lost family members or old friends, or providing detective services or phone book information.
With a quick search of your name on any given people-finder site, you’ll most likely find your name, date of birth, names of family members, current and past addresses, phone number, and gender. Some sites will also reveal your marital status, hobbies, online profiles, and maps or a photo of your house. Intelius, for instance, claims to offer over 100 intelligence services, including a simple people search that provides a person’s address and phone numbers and a background report showing criminal activity (though even Intelius conceded in a 2008 SEC filing that its information is often inaccurate and out-of-date).
Many people-finder sites will give up enough information about you for free to total strangers that finding out would make you choke on your latte. In other words, anyone with an Internet connection can stalk you from their couch with a couple dozen keystrokes.
Scary? Completely.
HOW PEOPLE-FINDER SITES GET YOUR INFORMATION
People-finder sites typically use these sources to compile their information about you:
• Birth certificates
• Business and entity filings
• Census statistics
• Criminal records
• Death certificates
• Driver’s licenses
• Government spending reports
• Legislation minutes
• Marriage licenses and divorce decrees
• Political campaign contributions
• Professional and business licenses
• Real estate transactions (including appraisals)
• Sex offender registrations
• Trademark filings
• Unsealed lawsuits or legal actions
• Voter registrations
They also use information that you’ve supplied by doing any of these things:
• Completing surveys
• Entering sweepstakes
• Posting in forums
• Registering for online accounts and completing profiles
• Returning rebate and warranty cards
But don’t throw in the towel yet. You can do something about this.
IT SOUNDS LIKE THERE’S NOTHING I CAN DO, SO WHY DO ANYTHING?
You can fight this crazy privacy invasion business by opting out of people-finder websites. (You’ll find a sample opt-out letter and a list of websites to send it to in the Resources section.) The opt-out procedures are often complicated and daunting, and I’m pretty convinced that they’re intentionally intimidating for the average person. That’s because these sites don’t want to remove your data. However, they’ll usually do so if you officially request it, though you’ll have to give them your information in order to get them to remove it. Something doesn’t sound right there, for sure, but there’s no other way to get the job done. Do what you can to block online tracking; it won’t hurt to use browser add-ons that block targeted advertising cookies and trackers.
Many sites require that you scan and provide your ID, and they make things harder by accepting opt-out request letters only by fax or postal mail. If you need to send them your ID, never do so without blacking out your photo and ID number first.
Not only are the opt-out processes frustrating in general, but they are also all frustratingly different. While many of the companies are subsidiaries of the others, each has its own opt-out procedure, and some of the sites don’t even state that opting out is possible in their openly stated privacy policies, even if they have backroom privacy policies that do allow it. Don’t give up! This is still your information they’re trying to peddle, and you can insist that they knock it off.