Remove Your Spokeo Listing

Don’t you hate how companies sell your data without your permission? As a marketing professional, I have often dealt with confidential information. So I’m very sensitive to the issue. Many companies make enormous effort to safeguard data. Others are ignorant of the issues or plain careless. (Wow, could I tell some stories.) Government is notorious for selling your motor vehicles data and making other information public. You can thank them for all the crap phone phone calls and unrelated junk mail you get. It’s unfortunate that so much of your private information is available to literally anyone with a credit card.

“Not Your Grandma’s White Pages.”

Spokeo.com is one of a number of companies that make money off of your personal information. They reveal a significant amount of information about you and connections to family members.

This video explains the privacy concerns. Spokeo has successfully defended it’s position.

If you haven’t done so already, visit the Spokeo.com website and see what’s listed about you and your family members.

Good news is you can request removal. But it will take a little bit of effort. I recommend that you do it now.

How To Remove Yourself From Spokeo

Spokeo claims to have one of the easiest methods to unlist yourself. Here’s what I needed to do to delist records:

1. Visit Spokeo.com and search on a name.
2. Copy the URL for a listing.
3. Go to http://www.spokeo.com/privacy/, paste the URL, a working email address and enter a CAPTCHA code.
4. Check my email and click a unique URL to complete the delisting request.

Not that hard to do for 1-2 listings. But if you got more to do…

Got Lot’s Of Family To Delete? Get Ready For A Few Hassles.

1. Hassle #1: You can only use a valid email address to remove up to 2 listings.
2. Hassle #2: You can only submit up to 4 requests in a day.
   

   In order to prevent abuse, we must limit the frequency of privacy requests. Please try again tomorrow. Government officials please use your @.gov email address for priority processing.

Regarding the number of requests per day, it seems to be based on the IP address you connect to the Internet from. The work around is by using an IP anonymizer. They can be behave oddly. The first I tried wouldn’t let me submit the form. This one worked for me.

Do what you can to safeguard your info and share only what is necessary.

While we’re on the issue of privacy, follow these steps to Stop Unwanted Telemarketing Calls.

Hope you find this helpful. Please share any helpful tips for protecting your privacy in the comments below. Thanks.
-Roland