I was prompted to conduct internet searches of my phone number mid-week, after receiving a number of very early morning phone calls from expectant people in Canada who seemed to think that I'd called them.
Who benefits from that sort of mischief?
Deja vu?
This happened --and I blogged about it-- only a few weeks ago. This time, I got more curious than usual. My phone number is listed on one "Who Called?" type website as "Suspicious" (alas), but so far, there are no complaints from humans.
In no particular order, here's what I discovered:
usaprofilepages.com had my phone number and altogether too much information about me, but in the footer there is a link called "Delete My Identity" and it works.
WhoEasy.com did not make it easy to opt out, and I spent some time poking around on that site but an email to support@whoeasy.com resulted in prompt manual removal.
peoplebyname.com had an online process. I think. I remember calling one site that tells the world that I cohabit with three impossibly ancient gentlemen with uncommon Biblical names.
findoutwhocalledme.com is a "beenverified" site is highly inaccurate and has probably destroyed a lot of romances judging by all the ladies who write glowing reviews claiming to have discovered that their (probably innocent) lover is married or living a double life.
They claim that they will remove a listing if you email removephonenumber@yeah.net
But they don't. Beenverified claims that it will remove your info. You can call 888-579-5910 and a robot will provide instructions for opting out via beenverified.com/optout. However, this only works if you have one name, and one home.
They will not permit you to delete your info if you have a second home or timeshare.
areacode-Lookup lets you opt out online.
www.callersmart.com is a tricky site and not worth your time. They appear to require you to open an account in order to opt out, and also require you to give them far more information than they already have, which you --by virtue of using their site-- authorize them to use. Moreover, if you are foolish enough to link up using a phone, they will scrape your address book and annoy all your friends.
The solution is to email feedback@callersmart.com and a seemingly live and polite person will manually remove your info.
Spokeo.com has an opt out form on their site.
Then there is zabasearch, intellius, and radaris.
I left radaris alone because they had scraped so much information about my writing career and writing awards (I think scraped from a long-abandoned social media site) that I was overwhelmed with pleasant nostalgia.
As for the phone calls, I cottoned on by the second call, but the Privacy and Cyber Security Update legal blog by the impressive international team at Skadden gave me insights into what's probably behind the international annoyance. Equifax!
Lexology link
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=8a6961ea-b72d-45d4-8263-c34d93a44be2
Original link
https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2019/11/privacy-cybersecurity-update?sid=a066f17e-7fff-4e11-bb99-0a78b1492771
Impressive cast of experts
Thanks to the sloppy people at Equifax, everyone should search their own names, dates of birth (always provide a memorable fib on social media sites), addresses, phone numbers, passwords (oh dear!!!), email addresses, driver's licenses, and credit card numbers.
Even if you freeze your credit and subscribe to various bank, credit card, and commercial "locking" services, you are not safe from telephone annoyance.
As for piracy, and nothing to do with abuse of telephone numbers, Bookza is back as "Zlibrary" with fake blurb about how they respect creators and intellectual property. If you send them a DMCA notice to support@bookmail.org a robot will reply promptly to assure you that your books have been removed. Here's the kicker, if you revisit the page, it may tell you that the legal owner has removed the link, but they provide would-be book thieves with a link to where the work can be found on a TOR site.
It's almost as bad as the internet search engine that most transparently removed piratical links, only to display them --still negotiable-- on a virtue signalling page of their own.
All the best,
Rowena Cherry
SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/ http://www.rowenacherry.com
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