Screenshot of the Spokeo Website

Yes, it’s April Fool’s Day.  Yes, the title of this post sounds a bit ominous.  But you know what?  We stumbled across a site yesterday, that may make you stop in your tracks and it’s NOT a joke.  The site is called Spokeo.  It’s an aggregation of all things you and it’s a bit scary.

You simply type in any name of any person and voila, like magic, information like that person’s address, credit score, home value, and education pops up for the world to see.  We tried it and although there were certain parts that were slightly inaccurate, there were others that were a little too close to home for comfort.

The good news is that you can remove yourself relatively easy by going here.  You’ll need to have the url from your profile on Spokeo first though and then you have to enter your email address – which goes who knows where.

Their justification for the site is that all of this information is available through profiles throughout the net.  And you know what?  They’re right!  But, we can’t see what good can come from a website that makes it incredibly easy to gather all of this information from one place.  Oh, and of course there’s a catch…for a fee, you can get even more detailed information about the person you’re searching.

The web, social networking and freely flowing information make it especially easy to find out just about anything about anyone, but when you know it and can control at least a portion of it, why wouldn’t you?

How do you feel about privacy vs. the internet?