Privacy FAQs
- What can others find about me?
- How does Spokeo respect my online privacy?
- How do I make my content private?
- Can anyone know who I am searching?
- Will Spokeo email my contacts?
- Why does Spokeo ask for passwords?
- Does Spokeo read my emails?
- Are my passwords safe?
- What about my social network account password?
- What if I still don’t want to give out my password?
1. What can others find about me?
Everyone on the Internet, including Spokeo, has access to your publicly available content. Spokeo does not hack into your private accounts. If your friends can find you on a social network, they can also find you on Spokeo. If your friends cannot see you on a social network, they still cannot see you on Spokeo. If you don’t want your content indexed by Spokeo, simply make it private. Spokeo Privacy Mirroring technology will intelligently detect and reflect your new privacy settings.
2. How does Spokeo respect my online privacy?
Spokeo’s proprietary Privacy Mirroring technology recognizes your content’s privacy settings and updates our database accordingly. Unlike most search engines, Spokeo’s database is dynamic and privacy-sensitive. Whenever you change your content from public to private, Spokeo will automatically detect and reflect this privacy change the next time we re-crawl your content. Please note that the re-crawling action might take couple days due to the update frequency constraints.
3. How do I make my content private?
To make your content private, or to delete your content, you would have to go back to the website on which you posted the original content. Spokeo is not a social network or a content-hosting site. It is more like Google in terms of technology. Spokeo does not have the access to change your original content, so you would have to go back to the original website to do that.
4. Can anyone know who I am searching?
No, all your Spokeo searches are completely anonymous. Spokeo is not a social network where people meet new friends online; rather, Spokeo is a search engine that people use to research others’ information. Spokeo does not notify anyone about what you are reading, and Spokeo does not disclose your search history.
5. Will Spokeo email my contacts?
No, we do not email your contacts in any way for any purpose. When you search for someone, or when you import an address book, we do not email or notify any of the searched contacts. We have several security checks in place to ensure the integrity of your contacts data. In Spokeo, your reading privacy and search anonymity are 100% protected.
6. Why does Spokeo ask for passwords?
Actually, Spokeo does not require you to supply third-party passwords to use the service. You can sign up for Spokeo using any email address and password through API Authentication or email verification methods. However, providing your email password will streamline your address import process into one simple click, significantly enhancing your user experience. Spokeo is all about finding your friends’ content based on relationships you have already established in your other networks and through email. You could enter all this information manually, but why would you?
7. Does Spokeo read my emails?
No, Spokeo does not read your emails. Your email password, should you choose to trust us with it, will be used once and only once to retrieve a list of your contacts’ names and email addresses. We do not store your email password, and are therefore unable to access your email account after the initial import.
Yes. Spokeo does not store your passwords directly. No one, including Spokeo employees, has access to them. Therefore, even if our database got hacked by mean script kiddies, your passwords would still be safe. To dig into the technical details, Spokeo uses modern cryptographic hash functions to store your login password, and we only store a one-way hash. This means that we can verify when you have correctly entered your password, but don’t actually know it ourselves. The mathematicians tell us this is safe, and your banks and financial institutions do the same thing.
9. What about my social network account password?
If you choose to enter in your social network password, we can then syndicate both public and private information accessible by you on that network. Your social network password is safe because we only store a hashed version of your password that can only be unlocked using your login password. This means that we only have access to your social network password at the moment you login. We quickly grab your friends’ stuff and then forget your password. Your social network password is never stored insecurely.
10. What if I still don’t want to give out my password?
That’s understandable. Spokeo also supports Google, Yahoo! and Windows Live (Hotmail) Authentication APIs. This allows security-conscious users to create a Spokeo account without handing over their webmail credentials. Unfortunately AOL doesn’t provide a webmail authentication API. We fully intend to support AOL, should they ever implement it. To learn more, you can read about Google AuthSub here, Yahoo! BBAuth here, or Windows Live (Hotmail) Delegated Authentication here.
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