Wednesday, January 9, 2019

Websites Publishing People's Personal Information – Lack of Privacy with Modern Technology

If you have Googled yourself recently, you my have been surprised how much of your personal information is online without your consent. While we have control over what we put on the internet such as pictures, videos, and our personal opinions, we do not have control over everything that is out there including public records.

There are many websites these days that specialize in gathering all your public information and publishing it online. This included things such as your current address, previous address, family members, age, phone number, email address, car you drive, and more. Even if you are careful about not putting your personal information out there, it can still be found and published on these sites.

If you find your information on one of these sites and you don't want it on there, sometimes they have an option to opt-out or submit a request to have it removed. However, this is usually not very easy and requires some effort to find. Often the websites will tease an option to have it removed and then bring you to a payment page where they say you have to pay them to have your information removed from their website. This tactic seems like blackmail, trying to get money from people who never wanted their privacy compromised in the first place.

These website say they get their information from public records that are available to everyone. This may be the case, but these website are digging up people's personal information and making it even more easily available online for their own profit. I believe there needs to be more regulations put in place to protect people against this sort of thing.

It can be a matter of personal safety. For example if someone knows your name and they have a general idea of where you are from, it is pretty easy for them to do a quick search and find exactly where you live. They can find out more of your personal information such as who is related to you and where they live.

As of now there does not seem to be much attention being given to this subject of privacy. In the age we are living in now with technology, there are certainly a lot of benefits, but we are also sacrificing our privacy as a result. The simple act of owning a smart phone means giving up a lot of privacy. By carrying around a phone pretty much everything is documented from where you are, to who you contact, to what you look up.

Some say in these times, we can no longer expect privacy and we just have to embrace it and put ourselves out there. Personally I still think privacy is important and we have to make sure it does not get compromised.

I recommend doing a search on yourself by name and location to see which websites are publishing your personal information. If you care about privacy, you may want to contact some of the websites that pop up and request that your personal information be removed.

No comments:

Post a Comment