Hijack!
I did this today, and found nothing that wasn’t available publicly. Your name and address is readily available in numerous places, and once you have that, most county property records are online, as well as an easy Google maps search. A lot of the interest info comes from places like LinkedIn and other websites you may have joined. Several of those types of things are wrong in any case.
I found nothing that was secret about me, but I didn’t join to see what more they would have.
I’m aware of all of these things and regularly search myself through the various channels to make sure nothing questionable is up- I have a unique name, too, so there’s that. This is the first time my home address was posted anywhere that I’ve searched— and I don’t even own the house, so property records have nothing to do with it. Clearly, a company sold my info to somewhere and then it was swept into this aggregate search. I’m actually about 95% sure which company did it, too, because only one company sends me mail at my home address and my dad’s PO box. Oddly, I just filed a complaint with the State Attorney General’s officer over this company a few months ago, then this pops up. Odd, indeed. . .
I work in an environment where it could be tremendously unsafe for me if a client were to get a hold of my home address, so I’m on top of these things generally. Well, as much as I can be. My other job is coaching high school students, so I especially don’t want those mini creepers finding my house :).
Diosa: The approach I use is to create aliases that I use for various purposes. The key to this however is having a credit card company that will let you add authorized users to your card. Citibank allows this on my ATT Universal card. So I have several “users” who don’t actually exist. When you combine that with using temporary card numbers (in place of your real account number - something Citi also allows), at the very least it creates a great deal of confusion for the data miners and with a little luck can obscure your real identity.
Once your info is out in the ether however, I wouldn’t be optimistic about getting it back. If you work closely with law enforcement in your part time avocation, discuss the issue with them and see what special considerations may be available.
I don’t think there’s a child endangerment issue, but it still drives me nuts. If I’m looking for my old friend Susan Oldfriend on Facebook, I’ll find several with pictures, several without pictures, a bunch with useless pictures (e.g., pictures of kids, avatars, or cartoons), and a bunch with pictures of multiple people. How the heck am I supposed to figure out which one is “my” Susan if she didn’t post a useful picture?
The multiple people one bugs me the most. Men don’t seem to do this unless it’s a picture of them with their significant other. It seems like half the women on Facebook have a profile picture that’s them with another woman. If I haven’t seen you in 20 years, I don’t know which one is you!
I just looked myself up on there. Lots of information you could get from a phone book, plus some other interesting stuff. Roughly half of the stuff that isn’t in the phone book is wrong.
I tried to look myself up on that. I think I found myself, but I am not sure. One of the advantages of being named Jacob Brown. Go ahead and look me up on Google, Spokeo, or Facebook. I even have a coworker, also a Facebook friend, named Jake Brown, although we have different middle names.
My current Facebook profile pic isn’t of my kids, which would be nigh impossible since I don’t have any, but is of me and my siblings when we were kids. A coworker, who didn’t know me when I was five, and actually wasn’t even alive then, looked at the pic and knew I wasn’t my brother or my sister. He thought I had awesome, dark eyes, which I apparently don’t still have. If you are looking me up and you have actually seen me IRL, you could ID by that pic of me at five years old.
I don’t like it when people use their kids as profile pics on FB, but them with their kids is fine. When looking up people from HS or college, it always surprises me how many of them are parents, but then I have to remind myself that I am the weirdo for not having any kids at 31.
An interesting blog about this FB profile picture whole thing.
Where in the rules does it say that the picture’s supposed to be of you? It’s really not. It can be anything you want. It’s not even a ‘norm’ for it to be a picture of yourself.
My current picture is of my dog, and I’ve considered putting up a picture of my daughter with my dog just because I think it’s cute. If doing so would cause someone to delete me as someone who’s got nothing else but parenting in their life, then that’d be all well and good, because anyone who thinks that clearly isn’t reading my posts.
My profile picture doesn’t show up to non-friends, so it’s irrelevant when it comes to people from years ago searching for me. If I haven’t been in touch with them for that long then I’m not that fussed about them being able to find me anyway.
You’re right. People don’t have to use pictures of themselves.
Yes, it is.
If it was the norm to use nyour own picture, then it would be unusual to use something else, which clearly isn’t the case. It’s common to use your picture, but it’s also common to use something else, and lots of people switch between both; your profile picture is supposed to show what you look like’ is simply not true.
Thanks to both of you for bringing this up. I had never heard of the site, and if I had I would just scoffed and figured it was like the others with very little info on it. I went and it had my address and a phone number that wasn’t even close to mine, but still! It also had some family members in there.
I also found out I have kids. I wish they would write.
So. It was a little off. But, even the little that was up there was weird. Aside from companies I deal with I never ever put my address anywhere online. So, yeah, companies sell my address. Oh well.
I didn’t like my it being up there. So, I went through the process of removing it. I also removed a couple of others. It seems to be gone. But, I went to the trouble of using a mailinator account to make sure they couldn’t link me to my real address, or harvest my email.
Oh regarding FB kid pictures. It’s kind of annoying when their kids are all the Mom and Dad talks about. You say you just took a vacation to Greece and they say “Oh! Billy just read a book about the Greek Myths in pre-school. If he were here he would probably say Zeus. He says it like Goose. It’s really cute.”
Luckily, most of my friends are not like that. And, if they have a kid picture it is up briefly for a special event. Or it’s the kid and the parent together.
Here’s a good place to see someone vent about this parent obsessive behavior on Facebook.
(Stay away touchy parents. You will not enjoy.)
What do you mean it isn’t the case? You’re in a thread full of people complaining about people who don’t conform to the standard and instead put up pics of their spawn. Just because I don’t stop every time I see someone with a pic of their kid as their profile pic and go “woah! That’s unusual!” doesn’t mean that using a picture of yourself isn’t the norm. I have around 40 friends on Facebook. Maybe three of them aren’t using pictures of themselves.
I don’t get this “it’s supposed to be a picture of you!” stuff. No, it’s supposed to be a picture of whatever I want to put up there.
If you can’t find me because it’s not a picture of me then guess what, I don’t want to be found.
I have no problem with people putting up pictures of their kids, their dogs, their Aunt Gemma, their cat, Frank Zappa, a beer can, the Statue of Liberty for a profile pic … for fsck’s sake, it’s THEIR web page, not mine. Put up whatever you want.
Last time I checked, I don’t rely on my Facebook profile image to represent who I am.
Agreed.
This thread makes me think of the complaints about someone’s answering machine (dating myself there) having their kids on it. YOU CALLED ME. In this case, YOU can control what you see. If you don’t like it, hide my posts or go so far as to unfriend me. I really don’t care.
My photos have had me on the beach at Cabo, me with one son surfing, me with another son hiking, me and my wife when dating 20+ years ago, etc. I also have albums of kids, of me, of the family, etc. I sometimes post photo updates of my kids (e.g. rugrat #1 just started X grade with a pic). With the iPhone app for Facebook, this is really easy.
You can’t figure out whose site it is? Hint - do we have mutual friends? If NO, then odds are this is not the droid you are looking for.
Finally - the fear of child molesters is horribly overblown in our society. They ARE out there, but I just don’t see them as a threat from MY Facebook account.
I just ran my current FB updates from my iPhone. I see people photos, random photos (Che, an “Obamafied” shot of a friend, a guitar, some art someone painted, formal studio headshot of a guy who does consulting, two little kids, and random regular photos.)
If the photo someone is using on FB really bugs you that much, MAYBE you are spending too much time on FB.
If you see photos that you object to on a regular basis, or even occasionally, you can use the Adblock+ plugin for firefox (don’t know if there is an IE version). If you have that installed, all you do is right click on the image. You will get a window that shows you the various directory levels you can block. Don’t worry about what that means at the moment if that’s not already clear. Just pick the first radio button and it will block only the image you clicked on. The other options are for blocking entire subdirectories.
GTFO. I think some people think too much.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, especially if your profile is set to private, as long as it’s not a picture that they could be embarrassed by when they’re older.
I also really doubt that a pedophile or other dangerous person would see the picture and then go to the trouble to hunt her down. It would be way more trouble to them than it would be worth.
I said it clearly isn’t the case that it’s unusual to use something other than your own picture on your profile. Like you say, this thread is full of people talking about people using pics of kids (which is only one way in which people might use something other than a picture of themselves).
If it were so unusual, this thread would have instead been full of people saying ‘wow, people really do that?’
I don’t mind when people put pictures of their kids. But an acquaintance of mine was really excited that her daughter was becoming potty-trained, and changed her profile pic to a pastel blue bowl containing a fresh, steaming toddler turd. That was the day I figured out how to ignore someone’s posts on facebook.
I don’t think it’s really endangering your child, except in special circumstances.
It terms of other factors… I do find it annoying when in order of most to least annoying:
(3) is the least annoying because, the profile pic also serves as the person’s avatar (thumbnail picture next to their posts) and there is no reason that that should have to be anything in particular. It’s a weirdness of FB that you can’t have a separate thumbnail avatar from your profile pic.
OTOH The annoyances of having a profile pic that changes with the tides of various memes and vagaries can be almost entirely mitigated by having some other real (and public) photo of yourself somewhere in your profile pics folder.