Spokeo: all kinds of awesome. Not.

14 years ago

My wife sent me an email today about Spokeo.com. This is a site that aggregates public information on the internet about individuals and then sells it. The site allows you to remove yourself if you want to. (In essence, search for yourself, find the page, copy the URL, and then click on the Privacy link at the bottom of the page. They send you an email with a remove link.) I removed her because of her job, but I decided to see what they had on me.

photo © 2007 Erica Olsen | more info (via: Wylio)Now, I’m a fairly public person anyway, so it would be interesting to see what was there on Yours Truly. After all, all you need to do is to Google my name and you’ll get to my résumé, my acting résumé, this blog, my blog at DevExpress, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, various other sites, and so on so forth. A veritable banker’s box of information. As I said, I’m pretty open. So I ponied up my 15 bucks for three months access and sat back to read about myself.

First off, they got my address and house phone number right. Not difficult, I’m in the phone book and they already admit to using those as a basis for their aggregation.

Next item was my email address. I actually use three: my DevExpress one, the one for this domain (which I’ve had since 1998), and a Gmail one. The first two I make public anyway (it’s easy to find them), and the Gmail one is the one I use for registering my domains. I also have three or four other free ones that I don’t really use. So, the one they have? Are you ready? julianb@turbopower.com. Yes, the one I lost in January 2003 when TurboPower closed down (glossing over the fact that I hadn’t worked there for a year at that time anyway). 8 years out of date. Just that piece of information being wrong tells you that Spokeo’s data is likely to be pretty crap.

Then they have a section called “Basic Results”. This one’s a hoot. Let’s go through it item by item, my notes in square brackets.

• Age:  54, born November 1956 [Wrong, my true birthdate is available on my Facebook page.]
• Gender:  Male [Correct, but then again Julian is a male name.]
• Ethnicity:  English [Correct. Nice job.]
• Zodiac:  Scorpio [Wrong, but then again, it’s calculated from my birthdate, and they got that wrong.]
• Relationship:  Single [Wrong. By nearly 13 years in fact.]
• Children:  1 [Wow, completely wrong. We do have 4 cats, does that count?]
• Occupation:  Professional/Technical [Sure, but a bit generic considering I make no secret of my job position.]
• Education:  High School [Yeah, I did that, and then I went to University and took Mathematics and got a BSc…]
• Political Party:  Republican [This one had me laughing out loud. A guess given where I live, perhaps? Completely wrong.]
• Registered Voter:  unknown [Couldn’t find me, eh? Because I’m not a citizen, perhaps? Ya think? Aside: nowhere do they know that.]
• Religion:  Protestant [Another LOL. Utterly wrong, as can be evinced by this blog, my Facebook page, my twitter page, etc. Perhaps another stab in the dark, given where I live?]
• Language:  unknown [Interesting. Hey, you know I’m English, so perhaps that’s a clue.]
• Hobbies:  Sports, Reading, Home decorating [Good grief. Sports? A hobby of mine is Home decorating? WTF? On the other hand, I do enjoy reading.]
• Home Owner:  Yes [Correct, but then again you can get this from public documents.]
• Residence:  Single Family House [Correct, ditto.]
• Length of Residence:  15 years [Wrong by a year.]
• Est. Home Value:  $264k [Well, that’s what Zillow says. Considering two of my neighbors are trying to sell at their estimated value and have failed for nearly a year indicates that the market prices are just wrong in this economic climate.]
• Neighborhood:  Middle Class [Not sure what this classification means, or even how many classifications there are. We’re all shopkeepers in this neighborhood?]

The next section is called Household, which is mostly about publicly available information about our house. Well, in theory, anyway. For instance I just learned I have a 3 car attached garage (which means that I have somewhere to keep the Volvo if only I could find the garage door for it), that there are two people living here of which one is my child aged 12. WTF.

The next section is labeled Wealth and comprises two gauges: Economic Health (“Very Strong” whatever that means) and Wealth Level (“Top 10%” Of the country? Of Colorado Springs?). To get to this data you have to accept a dialog saying that this information is quite possibly inaccurate and you shouldn’t rely on it. Why they warn you that this information could be inaccurate when so much of what has gone before is so utterly wrong, I have no idea.

Onto Lifestyle and Interests then. I play sports (no, sorry, not since I was 18 when I gladly gave up rugby), I love reading (yeah, we get it), I like reading cooking books in particular (well, yes, I do, but I read an awful lot more novels and technical computer books and science books and ...), I like reading about sports (enough already, I friggin’ hate sports, OK?), I subscribe to magazines (easy guess, I suppose, but which ones, eh? Monster Trucks Monthly, perhaps?), I have children (no, already; unless one of my ex-girlfriends didn’t tell me something), I care about healthy living (well, I suppose I do, but this is beginning to sound like a horoscope), I enjoy home decorating (no, I bloody don’t, which is why I gladly pay other people to do it for me), I enjoy food and wine (yep, this Malbec I ‘m drinking at the moment is going down very well, unlike this Spokeo nonsense), I research investments (hmm, the opposite of which is that I fling money around like confetti?), I donate to causes (yep, but then most people do), I enjoy shopping (not particularly), I enjoy retail shopping (er, not really, which is why I shop online mostly), I browse mail catalogs (OK, we get the Victoria’s Secret catalogs; shhhh, don’t tell), I buy from said mail catalogs (nope, I’m a viewer, not a spender). And that’s it. So, nothing about my passion outside work then: acting and directing? Nothing about what kind of music I like? Or that I own a classic car? Pah. I feel kind of cheated: I’m a more interesting person than they’ve aggregated, really I am. Pout.

Next up is Neighborhood. A bit worthless since it doesn’t state what “neighborhood” means (our immediate neighborhood? Briargate? Northern Colorado Springs? The whole of Colorado Springs?) They have a different meaning for Occupation here: Management, Sales, Labor, Construction, Farming, or Other. I’m plunked into Management, which is true I suppose. Other than that, general bollocks. Zillow’s is much better.

Then there’s a worthless short piece about Colorado Springs, snaffled from wikipedia, and some publicly available pictures of the city. Woot. Be still my beating heart.

So, all in all, a couple of pieces of information that are correct, but an awful lot of absolute rubbish. And don’t forget there are some absolute howlers in there too (hey, maybe my child is in my third garage reading my Bible?). Remember, I’m fairly open about myself on the internet and if this farrago of crap is any indication of what they can aggregate about someone who is somewhat public, just imagine how accurate it would be for someone who is not as open as me. Right.

So, a bit expensive for 5 minutes entertainment, but, apart from a couple of chuckles, all in all it’s pretty useless. By all means remove yourself from it, but I’d recommend not bothering paying the money.