We Know Where You Live - The Death Of Privacy Online

There has been a flurry of posts in discussion lists and online articles recently about a new Google feature called Google Phone Book, which will allow users to perform a reverse lookup search on any phone number. The results page displays a cute little phone icon beside the name of the owner of any phone number you plug in to Google's search box!

The address of the owner of that phone number is displayed with their name, and beside the address appear links that will take you to a Yahoo! Maps or MapQuest, which will provide detailed and precisely accurate directions that will allow the user to drive directly to their home!

The only way to make these results more invasive would be to include any known email addresses right beside the phone number, street address and driving directions! In fact, a popular new book for Internet geeks, called Google Hacks, from O'Reilly, offers tips on how to use that feature to refine your search further if you know the state or town of the person you are searching for!

Fortunately, Google has made it simple to opt-out of this privacy nightmare. Read Google's description of this “feature”.

They make it painlessly simple to opt out of the listing and promise removal within 48 hours. And finally, they provide a snail mail address to allow you to opt out of the listing by postal mail if you like.

Google Phone Book Removal
2400 Bayshore Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

…along with a warning:

One other service provides a clear and simple opt-out from the following link:

http://www.PhoneNumber.com/10006/remove.xhtml

So What? It’s in The Phone Book Anyway, Right?

When I first discovered this feature, I spoke with a relative whose response was basically, "So what? All that information is available in your local phone book and if you don't have that, you can call information nationwide to ask for the listing.”

Yes, that should be true. But I searched an unlisted phone number of another relative who was nothing short of horrified when they saw their home address, name and phone number pop up on the Google results page. Not only did her unlisted number show up, but so did her full name, which is not available even to her phone provider - because she uses only initials on her account with them. Clearly, these online services draw from other available sources.

Those additional services don't make it nearly as simple to opt-out as Google does -- they require that you jump through multiple hoops to find your way out of their invasive databases.

WhitePages.com’s privacy policy is linked very subtly at the bottom of the page, and was difficult to see, even though I was looking specifically for the link. The privacy policy offers zero options to opt-out of their database, nor does it tell you where to look for help!

Instead, the site owners tell you that they collect reams of information about how you use their site, what sites you visited in their network, any "voluntarily provided information" (which is required to register at the site) and who they share that information with. But they provide no published way to remove yourself from their database once you’re listed, no matter where they got their information.

The only hint of an opt-out option is via a simple email address, privacy@w3data.com This email address is a requirement of WhitePages.com's membership in BBBonline's Privacy Program, which is open to anyone who meets the Program’s minimum requirements: posting a privacy policy and providing an email contact to a privacy representative. Oh, and are willing to pay BBBonline for the privilege of displaying their rather meaningless “privacy lock” logo. Why is it meaningless? Well, just how private is a site that allows easy access to private personal information via a site search feature? And why do they deserve the trust of site visitors?

When you perform a search for any number in the "white pages" of SwitchBoard.com, it returns a page full of banner ads, some of which are pop-ups in which form fields are pre-filled with the name of the person you searched on! This allows you to easily search other sources for someone who has, so far, been successful at staying out of the online databases! And those paid services will pry into other public records databases to track them down!