The whack-a-mole game of sending takedown notices has been around for at least 20 years These services positioned themselves not only as facilitators, but as gatekeepers - a fundamentally different role than the search engine model. A company called Dig Dirt dropped a client when it learned through “back channels” that the subject had a restraining order against him. Old Friends got in touch with the subjects of a search and asked for permission before handing over details. The California-based Old Friends Information Services assigned internet-era private investigators to trawl public records, for example, charging $120 for successfully connecting two people.Įarly search services weren’t immune to privacy concerns, but some claimed to make a point of vetting their clients. Businesses cropped up to bridge the gap between online tools and non-internet users. People described rediscovering friends they’d lost touch with decades ago. While news reports that covered Households warned of identity fraud or junk mail, stories about consumer people search platforms reported things like “playing high-tech Cupid,” as one article put it. When ordinary people got access to online directories in the mid-’90s, though, the response was more ambivalent. The outcry was loud enough that Lotus killed the project before it was set to launch in 1991. Privacy advocates coordinated protest campaigns online, and 30,000 people contacted Lotus to opt out of the database. Even at the cost of $695 for the first 5,000 names, it would have democratized the distribution of personal data to an unprecedented - and uncomfortable - extent. One of the first major fights over personal data involved a planned Lotus CD-ROM product called Marketplace: Households, which paired names with addresses, income ranges, and other information. But historically, they’ve got more in common with the expansive credit check systems and other platforms that mined computerized records in the 1990s. The name of a site like Whitepages suggests that people search engines are simply digital phone books, an idea that predates the World Wide Web - in the 1980s, you could look someone’s number up by name, address, and profession in France’s Minitel network. One of the first directory controversies actually involved CD-ROMs, not the internet Looking up your name can provide a jaunt through your life history, from your first college residence to the apartment you shared with your ex-partner - maybe with the odd roommate or sibling’s name thrown in the mix. What unites them is the way they assemble data points into a sometimes eerily detailed dossier. Most allow people to remove their profile, although the process often varies.
PEOPLE SEARCH WHITE PAGES FULL
Some are free and ad-supported others charge money to unlock full profiles. Some promise comprehensive criminal histories, others addresses, phone numbers, or familial relationships. “People search site” is a broad term for the dozens of search engines based on public (and sometimes private) data like DMV and court records. And after two decades, we still don’t know what to make of them. It makes their data more useful, and more dangerous, than ever before. They’re the perfect example of how scale and searchability can change the meaning of data: the contents of thousands of phone books accessible from anywhere in the world, with an unprecedented level of detail.
People search sites are a perennially controversial feature of the web, from the venerable to the reviled upstart FamilyTreeNow, which was publicized and widely condemned earlier this year. Today, the ultimate privilege is being unlisted - but thanks to a complex ecosystem of online people search services, that’s nearly impossible. When the first phone book was published in 1878, it had only 50 entries, giving subscribers the names of fellow citizens privileged enough to have a telephone.
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