Protect all your online sources for your personal information...

I was reading an article about how the Spokeo is spooky – An online source of your personal information… in my monthly Costco Connection – July 2010 magazine.

The Costco Connection magazine builds community among Costco members by combining information about what’s new at Costco with a mix of lifestyle and small business articles.

This month talks about our online personal info future that is shaping right now… as Dave and I are always saying you need to have awareness especially online and in today’s social network environment we are all participating in, and I have seen this first hand, as all my old school mates are requesting my friendship on Facebook

: Image via Wikipedia

The Spokeo Story…

Spokeo is a search engine specialized in organizing people-related information from phone books, social networks, marketing lists, business sites, and other public sources. Most of this data is publicly available on the Web. For example, you can find people’s name, phone, and address on Whitepages.com, and you can get home values from Zillow.com. That said, only Spokeo’s algorithm can piece together the scattered data into coherent people profiles, giving you the most comprehensive intelligence about anyone you want to find.

Spokeo’s innovative technology has received numerous accolades and reviews from Newsweek, WSJ, PCWorld, and more. Millions of people have already used Spokeo to connect with their family members, old friends, and business contacts. Spokeo is located in Pasadena, CA.

SPOKEO VS. GOOGLE VS. FACEBOOK

How is Spokeo better than Googling someone? Google is the leader in organizing vast amounts of information from web pages, whereas Spokeo is a specialized tool for finding people-related data on social networks, phone books, marketing surveys, and more. By searching beyond the Web, Spokeo yields much more comprehensive and targeted results than general-purpose search engines for people-related queries.

How is Spokeo different from Facebook? Facebook is a social network on which users shares their personal data, whereas Spokeo is a search engine that aggregates data from various third-party sources. The difference between Facebook and Spokeo is analogous to the difference between You vs. Google Map taking a picture of your house. Data originated from you can be more detailed and accurate, but you also have the liberty to lie about it. Data pieced from public domains may not be complete, but it gives an objective, third-party perspective, which is valuable for people research purposes.

That all really sounds Good… So, whats so BAD about all this information sharing??

Because, every industry leader, government official, online security professionals, consultants, coaches and educators we have had on our CyberHood Watch Live Radio Show over the past 3 years has had the same advice, when asked what can “they” our listeners and followers do to protect themselves from cyber-crime, cyber criminals, ID Theft, personal security and privacy concerns… the #1 answer was to PROTECT your personal information at all costs!! never share anything online, on the phone or in person that you don’t want exposed to the public! see related story: OSA Investigates ID Theft & Personal Area Network

That is such great advice and you can see if this search engine tracks, compiles and then stores all of what we consider private, in a database…