As a senior, I have no accounts with MyLife, Facebook etc., and it scares me that my personal finances etc., are out there for scammers and con artists.
Google your own name and see if your personal details are listed.
This is very disturbing.
They buy public databases and start correlating data.
They cross-reference publicly available data.
I’ve been able to figure out who lives at an address, or where someone lives, when and to who they got married, when and where they were born, etc. for years. Just takes a little patience.
Per the other poster above me, all this data is public. People have figured out they can charge for this public data because other people are too stupid or lazy to do the work themselves.
Sites like that state it’s publicly available information. Some even go as far as showing relatives. I found one that connected my parents, sister, ex-husband, his wife #2 at one point and his current. I have requested many of them to remove my info.
Yes, public databases.
I think they’re also making inferences from the data, that may not be (and sometimes flat out are not) correct, e.g. estimated annual income and marital status. I looked up my profile and laughed at how out-of-date and inaccurate it was.
If I was inclined to do so I could find out that 123 Maple Street has a 2019 Ferrari registered at that address and,knowing that,I could show up at 2AM knowing that I'd find it...and lots and lots of jewelry.
A lot of information about you, me, anyone is actually part of the public record. If you know how to search for it it is readily available. Things like tax records,marriages, bankruptcies, some criminal convictions, credit history and such. It used to be you had to go down to a county records office and dig through old ledgers. Now it is all online.
Mylife.com has a bot that searches a bunch of existing databases when you put your name in the blank.
I found it useful because there is a loser in Tennessee with the same name and who is the same age. What this means is that things like credit agencies don’t always have correct information. They had me going bankrupt in Chattanooga when I actually lived in Wuhan in the PRC.
Well, I checked them out, they made one big mistake about me, they said I was Asian/American. I’m not.
Your personal finances are not out there. Anything they say is a guess. I wish I made what they said I made.
Why do you think all those stupid facebook questions: “Name all the states you’ve visited” are for? People are voluntarily providing all that info for the info grabbers.
One of my old taglines:
Want to be surprised? Google your own name.
Want to have fun? Google your friend’s names..................
It seems to me all these “social media sites” are into data mining, selling data and advertising.
If you can't beat 'em, deceive 'em. You can do all this just by managing the information on the free page, no log in, no buy in.
I just looked up mine. They say I lived in Chicago, never did. They list relatives including dead father. But none of my adult children. They said I went to college in New Mexico, never happened. My net worth and income are very wrong. My job is 4 years out of date. My neighbors are as many as 30 years out of date. And there are some neighbors I think are just wrong. So I suspect that they have some algorithm that scans and collects public information. They then make some assumptions and throw it in a bio. There is one sentence that reads, “Dave is now u.” I have no idea what “u” is. But I would say, that if you were a private investigator, you could start with this pile of miss information. And do some digging, to figure out what parts are true. And what parts are old or just wrong. Maybe that is what the FBI does, or people handing out secret clearances.
You can look at famous peoples bio too. I just looked at Hillary’s. Its clear here PR firm has edited it. But it gets her High school wrong. It ignores her eight years in the white house. And it does grab a lot of pictures from somewhere.
Remember when you where in school and some teacher said this would go on your permanent record and you laughed like it was a joke. Well it was no joke.
Information on each and everyone of us exist. Almost everything we do leaves a trail. Up until there were computers and then when storage space became cheap it was difficult to first gather and then sort that amount of data each of us creates by just living.
Now computer processing is fast and storage is immense and so your life is being saved somewhere without your knowledge or permission.
Welcome to the bold new world of 1984
PS - search your FreeRepublic user name - you will be surprised with what comes up
I noticed this the other day when looking up someone I lost contact with through the years. Had her income, neighbors....even the car she drives. Scary stuff!!
On other similar websites, I have found addresses of gov’t workers ie lois learner, Manafort, Comey, etc.
If you think that is disturbing, you should see what Google accumulates for the American Democratic Party, and the Communist Party of China.
Artificial Intelligence software mines mountains of data on every keystroke you make, every site you view, and how long you look at each page, every bank account or credit card transaction, who your friends are, and where you are every minute of the day (if you have a cell phone with you). They can tell things about us that we don’t even realize ourselves.
I just looked up ‘barack obama’ in zip code 20008. It says he is 33 years old.