![]() In 2014, the journalist Julia Angwin tried to remove her information from the databases of every data broker and people-search engine she could find. It’s rarely as easy as it sounds: There’s no legal requirement for brokers to accept or honor requests for removal, and many go out of their way to make it difficult, if they make it possible at all. If all this readily accessible personal information makes you uncomfortable, by all means, try to remove your records. Most sites let you perform reverse searches, too: Enter a phone number or email address and you can see who owns it. (These details can lay bare the details to common security questions, like “What street did you grow up on?” and “What’s your mother’s maiden name?”)Īnother small payment will buy you a background check that searches for the person’s criminal history, court records, properties, business licenses, and other details. All you need to know is a name-if it’s a common one, another detail like state or age will help narrow the search-and you’ll get back that person’s age, phone numbers, email addresses, current and past home addresses, as well as their family members and “associates,” which can include more distant relatives or roommates. On people-search sites, a few clicks (and sometimes a small payment) will unlock information on just about anybody. There’s little that these sites can do to keep people from using them for unauthorized purposes. There are legal limits on how people can use information gleaned from these sites-they can’t be used to evaluate a job candidate, for example, or to stalk someone-but there are few actual safeguards in place to keep a user from doing just that. Add in public information like birth, marriage, arrest, and court records, and incredibly detailed profiles begin to emerge. Most of these sites are powered by large, shadowy data brokers without publicly accessible search features, which track the personal data of millions of people. But there are dozens of general people-search sites out there, like and Spokeo, that serve up personal information to anyone with some free time and a few bucks to spend. It bills itself as a genealogy research site-a free, less powerful version of the dominant service-that allows people to search for their family members and assemble detailed family trees. MyFamilyTree is just one site in an extensive web of online services that compile, store, and sell (or give away) personal data. Trying to scrub your identity from the internet is like trying to drain a bucket of water with an eyedropper, while a dripping faucet slowly fills it back up again. (I reached out to FamilyTreeNow through its website, and to its founder, Dustin Weirich, whose contact information I found on -Weirich appears to have removed his information from FamilyTreeNow since Brittain’s tweets went viral-but I didn’t receive a response.)īut even those who were able to opt out of FamilyTreeNow were only barely less visible online than they were before. The site’s profile-removal tool soon buckled under the weight of the traffic, leaving people to send manual removal requests through the website’s contact form. Replies ranged from disbelief to anger, as other users urged their friends and family to opt out, too. She followed a labyrinthine set of steps to remove her and her husband’s profiles from the website, and tweeted out instructions for others to do the same.īy the next morning, the first tweet in her thread had been retweeted more than 3,000 times. Her sister’s profession puts her at risk of retaliation, and Brittain didn’t want her young kids to be put in harm’s way, too. ![]() Something unusual popped up: Her niece, Brittain’s kids, were listed as her “associates.”īrittain was rattled. ![]() As a part of a routine search for her own internet footprint-Brittain’s sister works at a child-advocacy center-she had entered her own name into the genealogy site FamilyTreeNow she’d just read about on Facebook. Last week, Anna Brittain, a young-adult author based in Birmingham, Alabama, got a surprising text from her sister. ![]()
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