Your data is public. What to do about it?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

There are some factual questions here, but I’d prefer to have the discussion in a more casual forum where people can muse, digress, and lightly rant at will. Maybe it needs to be in IMHO? Mods, if this gets any responses, feel free to move anywhere.

My partner Googled his cousin’s name for some reason. What he found shocked him: sites like Spokeo and TruePeopleSearch listed a huge amount of personal info about the cousin and her entire family, including my partner, including me. I knew this stuff was out there, but it’s been a while since I looked, and there’s way more info on me than I thought there’d be, literally one click away from Google results on my first and last name:

  • My full name
  • Exact date of birth
  • Full current address, with a helpful dot on a map to show where I’m sitting right now. There’s a satellite view that shows my freaking car in the driveway.
  • Full prior addresses going back forever, including places I’ve merely rented, including names of rental roommates
  • Phone numbers going back forever and I mean FOREVER, since I was a kid
  • “Private” email address, the one I never use officially anywhere
  • Family members around the country who do not share my last name, with their addresses/phone numbers etc.
  • My alma mater, graduation date, degree
  • Current and past employers, job titles, etc.

(Entertainingly, since I’m only gay-married, I’m said to be unmarried and my spouse is a “possible associate.” Welcome to the enlightened and totally woke Year of our Lord 2024.)

I shouldn’t be shocked about any of this. I’m on LinkedIn and clearly that’s being fully scraped, so my employment and education information shouldn’t be a shock. And of course property records etc. are publicly available, so these websites are simply gathering it all together. I’m just shocked at the efficiency of it, and that’s just the free stuff. Pay $1.99 a month for the full background report, and I don’t even want to KNOW what’s available for all to see.

Questions:

  • When’s the last time you googled yourself? Are you aware of what data is out there one click away?
  • Are many of you more careful than I’ve apparently been, avoiding LinkedIn for this reason for example?
  • What do celebrities and rich people do about this? I assume I couldn’t easily find all of Taylor Swift’s home addresses and personal cellphones, right?
  • What could I do, not being rich or famous, if I wanted less information out there?
  • How much of a problem is it? I’m outraged in principle, of course, but what I’m thinking about is how many security protocols ask you a multiple-choice question “which of these addresses is somewhere you once lived?” Turns out anyone can correctly answer that for me. I’m also bugged by the middle name thing. It’s my legal name, but that’s NOT on LinkedIn and is semi-private, I thought or hoped. When I get a letter addressed to my full legal name, it’s usually from someone very legit like a bank or government. I need to INSTANTLY stop thinking this the next time I see my full name, and instead automatically assume it’s someone trying to scam me.

Sigh.

My dad is a musician, not exactly famous but with a long and interesting career; he’s worked with some well-known artists and published many albums and songs of his own. About 10 years ago he googled himself and discovered many of his materials on various webpages like Allmusic .com with a one-paragraph bio. He was OUTRAGED and freaked out, and asked me how he could have all this PRIVATE information permanently removed from the entire internet. (Surely there’s a bureau or something that will do this for you on request, like signing up for the No-Call List.) I had to explain sorry, it don’t work like that. You have published music, so websites that catalog published music are going to mention you. You don’t think of yourself as a public figure, but in this respect you are, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.

Summing up – we all have limited control of what information about us is publicly available, depending on how we’ve lived our own lives. I could have been more careful, no doubt, but during periods of looking for work, I couldn’t have not had a LinkedIn page, or used a fake name. I can’t hide my name on property deeds or from the phone companies. How much should we all care, and if it’s a real problem, what can we do now?

2

Out of interest, I googled myself. My name is not uncommon so there were a couple of pages of well-known people, many of them obituaries. I couldn’t see me there at all.

3

My name is uncommon, but event that started the line of thought was googling the cousin’s name. Her name is about as common as you could think up. All my partner had to do was enter that and her city, and found the info in a trice.

4

I guess that the Data Protection Act is working then.

5

I’ve ranted before about my lost wallet, back in December. As I said then, fortunately all my credit and bank cards and points cards, health insurance card, and just about everything plastic was in a different wallet so no great loss, except that my driver’s license, social insurance number card, and probably other stuff that I’ve forgotten about were in it, including even a long-expired student pilot’s license bearing even more information. So someone has much though not all of the information you listed in the OP.

What did I do about it? Nothing, except keeping an eye on my bank accounts and my credit record. I have not frozen access to credit as it didn’t seem worth the hassle, and with my luck as soon as I froze it I would need it. So far there have been no repercussions that I’ve been able to see. The credit accounts listed on my credit file are all legit.

I did get a scam phone call pretending to be from my bank saying that a fraudulent transaction had been detected on my debit card and the card was canceled and would I please call them at a fake number they gave. It’s disturbing that someone seemed to know where I bank, but they surely wouldn’t set up a fake 800 number masquerading as a call center just for me. I did call the number anonymously just out of curiosity and it was a passable imitation of a call center, but my bank’s fraud department confirmed that it was a fake number. It was probably unrelated to the lost wallet but who knows. Although there was no bank card in the wallet, there may have been a stray receipt or something identifying the bank.

6

I just tried to Google myself (unusual last name). There were six entries on me, including one based on a very old address. They all had some stuff available for free, but most of the really personal stuff, if any, was only available through a fee, like Spokeo. None of it was very private. A few items were laughably wrong, including an address that I had never lived at or near. My great-grandfather (same first and last name) has an entry as a military memorial for his civil war service. I know my email got out there at some point as a “live one” because I am constantly flooded with spam. I would be more interested in looking on the “dark web” if I knew how to do that, but I don’t.

I only had a bare-bones listing in LinkedIn for a while, because I wasn’t looking for a job or professional contacts, and then I deleted it when I started getting a lot of spam contacts from it. I am worried about various data breaches – I try to be reasonably careful, but it seems impossible to live in the modern world without giving some organizations at least some knowledge that would prove a risk to me if it were available.

7

I thought I had a very tiny footprint on the internet.
I have 2 email addresses. One for fun and looking at crap online. The other for my banking and accounts, bill paying stuff, my private email.

I never do email based medical stuff
I try to keep that in person or phone only. It’s getting harder.
I don’t do any social media.

But still someone got to my private email with some very scary stuff.

There’s no way in this age you are completely unknown. Unless you live in a cave.
No privacy safety can be assumed.

8

See, here’s me feeling like my phone is less secure than anything else. I’d never dream of using the phone for anything but that which I’d be grudgingly comfortable being public. This is probably dumb and paranoid for all the wrong reasons, and I’d be better off checking in at the doctor’s office using their awful medical portal on my phone, than on my desktop. But who knows?

I feel kind of hopeless about it. If I can’t even stop my doctor posting my medical records online (whoops, we got hacked, who could have predicted?) what control do I have over anything?

9

(tongue in cheek) You could move to Europe. :wink:

In seriousness, since I’ve relocated from the States to the EU, I am actually seeing less information on myself being returned in Google searches.

I assume at least some of the data aggregators have recognized that I’m now covered by GDPR, and have scrubbed their systems. Not many, obviously, but some.

I also assume that some of this effect is Google recognizing I’m in the EU, and proactively hiding extraneous personal data in their search results, so actually there’s just as much stuff out there but I’m just not seeing it.

10

And I’d expect the EU laws protecting citizens against for-profit data predators are much more robust, no? That would be the reason Google would limit results in the EU, I’d think (what other reason might they have?)

11

The European Union, to their credit, is much more aggressive about protecting personal privacy than the US and Canada. Google can whine about it all they want, but it’s the law.

12

One of LegalEagle’s sponsors is a company that says it will scrub your personal info from the internet. I have no idea if it really will do it.

13

In my estimation, no. To have any chance of success they’d have to threaten lawsuits and have a record of being willing to act on those threats. So at the very least it might take a shit-ton of money, and even then you might wind up with the “Barbra Streisand effect” where the offending material is removed, but not the factual stories about the lawsuits and descriptions of the offending material.

14

Beck my friend, what do you think we’re doing here?

15

Obviously she means the privacy-invading mass social media like In-Your-Face Book, Xitter, and the like.

16

Nah. I don’t do social media either, and this place doesn’t count at all. It’s categorically different from Facebook etc.

17

Of course, that’s a subterranean bar to clear.

18

What I haven’t seen mentioned here is arrest record. I’ve done many a Been Verified search on just about everyone I have ever known, just to be nosey.

I’ve found out that old college friends and ex’s have died. Seen what types of houses my high school friends ended up with and what types of cars they have owned.

19

I have a moderately common name and when I google it there are a lot of hits that are not me. When I specify mathematician all but me disappear. What is left is a rather uninformative Wiki page with birth date and place (no addresses) and HS and college, my current position and a very brief description of my current status (prof, emeritus). There is also a link to my web site, to a site that mentions some of my work, reference to my entry on the mathematical genealogy site (so you can find the names of my advisor and PhD students). I didn’t find anything personal there.

20

You’re notable enough you’ve got your own Wikipedia page but no address in a Google search. Impressive! I suspect the privacy laws in Canada (where you are, IIRC?) could be a bit stronger than the USian ones.