I have a very uncommon last name and am the only one ever with my first name and last name combo. I deleted my linkedin after I retired but I do have a locked down facebook ib my name. Also and Instagram and X where I have never posted.
All of the sites like spokeo and PeopleFinder have obscure and unique ways to get yourself removed that you can discover with a little googling. I am not on any of those.
It’s unlikely that you will ever be able to eliminate all traces of yourself but you can get most of it removed.
Many of the search engines have an opt out feature. Some are better than others. It takes time and effort. Once I started doing that with 411.com, truepeoplesearch.com, spokeo.com and other big names, the smaller search engines quit finding me as well. It will never be perfect but it works. Your public records are still available; it’s just harder to find them.
What really helps is never use a real email address with your real name for any social media accounts.
You know what skeeves me out most are the funeral notices online.
The dead persons whole family is listed. Full names. A bit of searching and you can find more info on those people.
I was innocently looking at an old school friend who’s parents were killed in a car wreck. The obituary listed my friend’s name and her children. The deceased persons address, an email to send condolences. Which turned out to be one of my friend’s kids. With their Facebook info prominently displayed.
I could of went there and seen all I cared to see, I suppose. I was able to find pictures of the wreck from newspaper articles.The obit even had recent pictures of what was a family reunion.
Many condolences listed with many emails. Even where the the dead man worked, his company sent a giant list of people at his company.
All I had was my friends first name and her last name before she remarried.
I share a name with a nepo-baby, so almost everything is about him. If I add my city to the search, I get better results but it also includes my mother’s hair stylist who happens to use an assumed name which is the same as my birth name.
Drilling down more, I don’t see much that isn’t from LinkedIn or from stuff I have put out there myself.
we should NOT care, as it’s not a real problem. We have more important things to worry about.
what we can do is mostly nothing. Except by lots of exacting & irritating limitations, which aren’t worth the effort for most people.
People get awfully paranoid about this, and act like it’s a big surprise. But it certainly isn’t much different from growing up in a village or a small town!
The saving grace is that most of us just aren’t that interesting, and most people don’t care enough to look up the information about us.
(Businesses, advertisers, scammers, etc. will, of course. But they’ve always done that, and we should just follow the same safety guidelines as always to combat this.)
I think the big fear in ordinary people is the possibly financial.
(There’s a few who might worry a job is in jeopardy if an employer finds out about medical problems.)
But most worry about their assets.
CCs are normally protected, nowadays. You shouldn’t be responsible if someone accesses your account. If you have that fear then maybe you shouldn’t carry a big limit. Or get a better protected card. If it’s your debit on your bank account, make sure you know your banks procedure and what they’ll do to back you up.
I’m of the belief(maybe wrongly) no one can actually sell your house out from under you. I find it hard to believe unless you are completely in the dark and are not paying your property taxes. Or some really strange scenario.
Anything else is just words on a screen. Who really cares.
Now, if you’re being stalked or something. All bets are off.
Just one caveat here. Now that PINs have pretty much replaced signatures as the CC authentication mechanism, banks like to take the position – at least as a starting argument – that if someone has your PIN then they are you or at least authorized by you. This doesn’t necessarily mean you’re screwed but it does mean that you have a much larger burden to show that the transaction was fraudulent. Someone trying to guess your PIN gets just three chances and then the card is locked out. You need to be able to credibly explain how someone got your PIN despite the contractual requirement to keep it secret, and “I wrote it on a sticky-note attached to my card” isn’t gonna work.
I just used booking dot com to make a hotel reservation. No PIN number requested. I typed in my credit card number and the “secret” 3-digit code printed on the back of the card.
Everything showed up in plain text as I typed. Card number, exp. date, the “secret” CCV number, my phone number, my home address, my email address.
If somebody hacks booking dot com, they have all the info they need to use my card and steal up to my credit limit.
That is a very good idea, but better be specific: The EU, not Europe. I believe the UK, Bielorussia, Russia and a couple of other countries that geographically should count as European do not apply the same level of protection.
In fact in the EU you have the right to ask an enterprise what concrete data they have about you and they must allow you to download it from their servers. And I mean download it, because they could never hand it out in paper form: here is a Guardian article about that from before the pandemic (data mountains have grown since) and it was already 5.5 GB for Google data and 600 MB for Facebook, which the author calculated sum up to more than 3.5 million printed pages.
Next you can ask Facebook to delete the data they have on you. In the EU you can request from any enterprise collecting your data that those be erased. Really, it is called “Right to be forgotten”. And they will, or harsh penalties will apply.
If this was the case and you could prove it it would literally cost Alphabet billions. From the second link above:
The more serious infringements go against the very principles of the right to privacy and the right to be forgotten that are at the heart of the GDPR. These types of infringements could result in a fine of up to €20 million, or 4% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher.
4% of Google’s / Alphabet’s / Meta’s / Facebook’s yearly turnover would be the highest fine in history. So if you have proof, as a whistleblower you would be entitled to a juicy cut. Go for it!
Oh, and concerning your new avatar, Cervaise, just out of curiosity: Is it the Luxemburg or the Netherlands flag?
I know that. The PIN is only relevant for in-person transactions that exceed the contactless “tap” limit. What I’m saying is that the PIN is considered to be your electronic signature. It’s pretty hard to dispute a transaction where the PIN was used, because the presumption is that either it was you or else you violated the cardholder agreement requiring you to keep it confidential.
Get off our continental shelf, would you, please, you half stranded American aircraft carrier? And don’t bump Ireland on the way away. OK, you may leave Scottland and the distilleries as place holders where they are. Oh dear, this hijack is not going to end well…
I have a (possibly) unique name, as whenever I do a Google search on my name everything that comes up relates to me. Almost every link that shows up is related to my convention activities, obituaries for my late wife and a close friend, and listings for me as a Kickstarter contributor for some projects. No Spokeo listing.
At my company, I have policy management and compliance on my plate, so I’ve gotten to know the various requirements and provisions of the GDPR pretty well. So as a personal data subject myself, I know when a company is jerking me around.
Case in point, Facebook. Their “download your data” feature gives you only and exclusively the data you yourself have uploaded: your Likes, your comments, your photos. Of all the other data Facebook has collected on you, this package contains precisely zero. I submitted a complaint to the Irish data regulator, and they came back a few weeks later with this response: “We asked Facebook about this, and they pinky-swear the download feature has everything you’ll be interested in, so we’re closing your case.”
The GDPR is pretty great until you run into a data protection authority that’s a lapdog of one of its country’s major players.
Yeah, but the problem is, I don’t currently have a good way to prove it. I’ve got a trip to the States planned in June and will be doing some trial searches to satisfy my curiosity.
Luxembourg. For a variety of reasons, I’ve been feeling pretty positively about my adopted home lately.
I see I have expressed myself too enthusiastically about the GDPR. The intention is good, the transposition into national law less so, and the execution is patchy, unfortunately. And the Irish as regulating authority are a shame. Almost on the same level as Saudi Arabia presiding the forum for women’s rights and gender equality at the UN. Almost.
