Is PeekYou Evil?

PeekYou - A People Search Engine

PeekYou.com bills itself as "the smartest way to find people online." But after looking for myself and some friends on PeekYou, I beg to differ. PeekYou is a Web search engine, like Google or Bing. Using its "algorithmic" secret sauce, PeekYou tries to estimate the probability that a set of particulars or a Web page belongs to a particular person. Don't ask me how it works. It did find my personal domain and several other Web sites that I maintain or have worked on over the years.

PeekYou also listed several cities in which I have lived, in some cases with partially obscured street addresses and phone numbers. This real-world information is where PeekYou and its partners make their real money. Clicking on one of the partially obscured records seemed like the natural thing to do. That took me to a new Web site run by Intelius, a public records aggregator. These firms buy billions of personal records from public sources - property records, court records, motor vehicle departments, voter registrations, etc. - and data from utilities, phone companies, the U. S. Postal Service change-of-address database, and other sources.

Of course, aggregators buy data so that they can charge you for it. For only 95 cents, I could get all 131 "People Search" records associated with my name. Each record includes name, most recent address and address history, date of birth, phone number (if available), and potential relatives. A $14.95 day pass would let me search for unlimited persons and download their reports in a 24 hour period. A $39.95 "background report" would include property records, criminal history, bankruptcies, liens, judgments, lawsuits, even a death certificate record. I'm hoping that only ONE of those items wouod show up in my report. :-)

Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

PeekYou also turned up a bunch of erroneous information, linking me to people, websites and addresses that are just completely wrong. A couple of people I don't know have tagged my Peekyou profile with their aliases.

It seems that PeekYou is just a honey-pot, a lure to draw visitors into its search engine where, hopefully, they will take the bait and pay one of PeekYou's partners for public records. Intelius is one of the leading public records aggregators. USSearch is another, and it charges similar fees. Spokeo is a third aggregator, but it charges by the month of use.

Some people are concerned that searching for their name on PeekYou reveals details they assumed were private. This includes their address, and in some cases an interactive map which pinpoints their home address. Other details can include links to your Facebook and Twitter profiles, names of relatives, and previous addresses. There's nothing criminal about aggregating the public records needed to create a profile of an individual. I would stop sort of calling it "evil" but the privacy implications of for-hire data aggregators are significant.

For less than ten bucks, a stalker may be able to track down his or her victim using just a name and some educated guesses. Of course, there are less alarming, legitimate uses for people-finders. Employment background checks, finding missing heirs, skip tracing, and just hooking up with high school pals are some examples.

I would not recommend PeekYou over Google for finding someone's online traces. But if you need to locate a person in the real world, and are willing to spend some money, public records aggregators are sometimes a viable (but not infallible) option.

Tell me what you think about PeekYou. Post your comment or question below...