Warning – Spokeo has your personal data spread out for all to see

A friend just sent me an email to warn me about a new kind of search engine and suggested that I look myself up on it. It freaked me out that so much personal information was so readily available.

It is Spokeo.com and if you are on it you can kiss your privacy good bye. You enter you name and you may find more information about your relationships, your home, your income, and your exact location than you will feel comfortable with.

Here is an example of what your basic information might look like if your name was Bart Simpson.

Here is what another Bart Simpson's house looks like with more information than you would expect to see.

Here is an aerial view of another Bart Simpson's house.

If this was your data spread out for all to view, you night want to see that is was removed promptly. Fortunately, there is a link at the bottom of the main page where you can delete any mention of your name. I have included a closeup of the link as it is hard to see.

This will take you to the page which will let you erase yourself from Spokeo.

You should try searching for your name with a few mispellings as you may be listed in several different ways in Spokeo.

One last point, Spokeo merely collects data that already exists. You may want to check out other white pages and personal search engines to see if you need to remove yourself from them also.