So I came into work this morning and shortly after I had settled in at my desk, my coworker starts calling for me in a panicked voice.

I went to his desk, and apparently a friend of his had alerted him to some of his personal information on a website. Not just any personal information either. Information about his neighbourhood, people in his house, income, age, birthday, interests, you name it. Of course, being me, I went and looked myself up.

What I found just about made my heart skip a beat. The website in question, www.spokeo.com, spiders social networking sites, blogs, and any other repository of public information and aggregates it. This is just plain scary people!

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.

According to snopes.com:

You can remove your Spokeo listing from public searches for free. Please note that removing your Spokeo listing from public searches does not remove your information from the third-party data sources. Your information will still be shown on other people search sites, and you will need to contact those third-party sites one-by-one

What is even scarier than just this, is that you can look people up by phone number and email address. You have the option to remove yourself, I suggest you do so IMMEDIATELY.

Sources:

http://www.snopes.com/computer/internet/spokeo.asp

UPDATE:

Remove yourself here: http://www.spokeo.com/privacy