- What can others find about me?
- How does Spokeo respect my online privacy?
- How do I make my content private?
- 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?
- What is my URL?
- Why do I have to provide my email address to remove a listing?
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 will not immediately take effect due to the update frequency constraints.
3. How do I make my content private?
Our email search reflects only what is found in public profiles across dozens of social networks. If your name or picture shows up on the search page, this would mean that your full name is recorded in one of the networks, such as MySpace or Facebook. Please remove your name off of all the social networks you may be on, or set them to private, if you do not wish for this to be so. Please be informed that the updated information may not reflect right away, as our servers only update periodically due to the abundance of new information and updates made on the web each day.
You may block your name and phone number search results from the following link: http://spokeo.com/privacy Please note that this will not remove your information from its original sources. Read our Privacy Policy for additional information. Please follow the instructions carefully, and email our Customer Service if you have any questions.
4. 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.
5. 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?
6. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
A URL is the ‘address’ of a web page on the world wide web. To locate the URL of your listing, click on the exact profile you want removed and copy the web address on the top of your internet browser. The URL will look similar to this: "http://www.spokeo.com/search?q=Smith%20Sample#Sample:12345678".
11. Why do I have to provide my email address to remove a listing?
Spokeo understands your concern to remain unlisted and provides a quick and easy way to opt out of any public search results. To prevent any abuse to the feature however, Spokeo asks that you provide your email address to send a customized link to. Clicking this link will authenticate and complete the removal process.
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