How To: Delete Your Spokeo Profile (Safeguard Your Personal Information & Privacy Rights)

Ever hear of Spokeo?

No, it's not a city in Washington state.  It's a website called Spokeo.com, and it marks the complete end of privacy on the internet.  If your phone number and address has been posted in a phone book, it's on there.  If you own a house, chances are there's a picture of it.  If you have a Facebook profile, it's probably listed.

Spokeo scours the web for information on everybody, right down to the color socks you're wearing right now.  Okay, maybe not that much information, but they post enough information about you that you should be scared.  They claim to be "not your grandma's phonebook" and provides others with your photos, bios, email addresses, wealth, hobbies, social networks and more.

On their website, they state:

Spokeo aggregates publicly available information from phone books, social networks, marketing surveys, real estate listings, business websites, and other public sources.  Spokeo does not originate data or publish user-generated content.  Rather, Spokeo indexes third-party data in ways similar to Google or Bing.

But all of this information is not free.  There's a $2.95 monthly fee for access to "full reports" on their website.  But who cares?  If you want to know everything about everybody, isn't three bucks a month a decent price?

No.  And if you want to delete all of your information that was scraped by Spokeo.com, then don't worry.  It's possible.  And here's how, thanks to Gini Dietrich over at Spin Sucks.

1. Go to Spokeo.com and type in your name.
2. Search the listings by state to dwindle down the results.
3. Find yourself and click on your name.
4. Copy the URL when it brings up your information.
5. Go to the bottom of the page and click on "privacy".
6. Paste the URL in the box provided.
7. Include your email address (it gives you further instructions via email).
8. Enter the code.
9. Go to your email and click on the link they provide to you.
10. Confirm the directory listing has been deleted.
11. Go back to Spokeo and search for your name to be sure it was deleted.

To help you out with this, Joe Hackman shows you how in the video below.