The Department of Motor Vehicles may also be selling your personal information. You may opt out by filing for a temporary change of address that will forward your mail instead of a permanent change. The information in the NCOA is available for purchase by companies for updating their databases on your new address. Permanent mailing address changes are recorded by the United States Postal Service in the National Change of Address database. Court cases, including those for bankruptcy and divorce, are also public by default. Property records are also public and will contribute to your location history. This information helps people search sites discover full names and family connections. Birth, marriage, divorce, and death records are available for request. The most common sources for your personal information are government records. You may opt out of these websites, but their existence points to a troubling question: Where is all this data coming from? The Department of Motor Vehicles may also be selling your personal information. These sites collected this information automatically without your permission. These sites have information on familial associations, social networks, work history, and much more. It closely resembles people search sites like Spokeo, Instant Checkmate, and PeopleFinders, except that those sites charge monthly fees of $5 to $35 to show full records. Answers to common security questions like “What is your mother’s maiden name?” and “What street did you grow up on?” are easily inferred.įamilyTreeNow is not the first website to expose this sort of data, but it is likely the first to do this for no cost to users. However, in addition to providing a current address to target with pizzas, SWAT teams, and in-person visits, they can also be used by a hacker to retrieve account passwords. These details might be considered trivial by most. In an age when everyone is at risk of being targeted by online mobs, cyberstalking, and identity thieves, this information being in one place is terrifying for anyone concerned for their safety and the safety of close friends and family. Associates generally include roommates, significant others, landlords, and tenants. Searching for my name and birthdate yielded the following information: my full name, my address history for the last decade, and presumed relatives and associates. As young adult fiction author Anna Brittain wrote, the site is an internet safety hazard. Despite its trappings as a genealogy site, it is in fact a "people search engine" best-suited for stalkers, blackmailers, and hackers. Birth records, marriage records, newspaper clippings none of these are present on this site. Genealogy sites will provide old records that have been scanned in so that you may find relatives. Lastly, the account sign-up page says, “Seriously everything is free, no catch.” But the entire website is the catch. It claims to have “one of the largest collections of genealogy records anywhere.” Some old-timey photos adorning the site give the impression that it can help you discover family from long ago. The website FamilyTreeNow presents itself as an alternative to genealogy websites such as Ancestry and FamilySearch.
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