Friday, March 26, 2010

Try again Spokeo

I'm subscribed so Snopes.com because I like to know what rumors are true. It's good to be informed. SO, this morning they had this post about the website spokeo.com. Spokeo is an aggregator website. It gathers information from various websites and puts it all together in one place. People like to get freaked out about sites like this because "ohmygosh all my personal information!" Here's the thing though. Everything on that website is already online somewhere. (The real lesson here is be careful what you post online.)

I have some stuff online, facebook, myspace, this blog (obviously), so I thought I'd go see what spokeo says about me. I put my name in the search and here's what it says about me:

First of all, our last name is spelled wrong. They have it as "Vandeboogaard" instead of "van de Boogaard." It says I am a male- WRONG, a virgo- WRONG, a homeowner- WRONG, have lived here for 3 years- WRONG, and have only a high school education- WRONG. Also, it gives an estimated home value of over a million dollars (it's a nice house, but I'm pretty sure it's not worth that much) but says the neighborhood is "below average." I don't know about you, but in my mind "million dollar homes" does not usually mean "below average neighborhood."

My profile based on the information they got correct reads like this:

I'm a Caucasian in my mid-20s who is in a relationship, has kids, and lives in a house. Really personal huh?

That's what you get if you search my name. If you search my e-mail it says I have 21 blogs (seriously? I barely have enough time to blog here) and I'm on 7 social networking sites- wrong again. If you search my other e-mail it says my name is elshag and that I'm on 41 social networking sites. I wasn't even aware that 41 networking sites exist.

I would say "nice try spokeo" but really? It's like they didn't even try. I can get more accurate information if I google myself. You can pay a monthly fee if you want more information but based on the free "information" I'm going to take a wild guess that it's not worth it. I guess the moral here is, if you're interested in becoming a crazy internet stalker, spokeo is not the way to go.

2 comments:

  1. Holy Cow!!! Sounds like Midland news groups when Caleb had his ordeal. Very accurate.

    ReplyDelete
  2. ok so maybe they were more accurate than this but they did say he was a suspicious looking hispanic male

    ReplyDelete

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