The internet knows all, I guess

September 7, 2020 2:51 PM

Why is my ex's name showing up on a people search site with my cell phone number, email address, and current home address, when are names aren't associated literally anywhere else on the internet or on any public records, and we only dated very briefly after I moved to this address?

I googled an ex with whom I'm no longer in contact and saw that his name was coming up as having lived in my current city, which was news to me. So I googled "ex name" "city name" and found a listing on ThatsThem.com with his name and my email address, my current home address, and my cell phone number. My name isn't included anywhere in the listing. I googled our names together after finding the result, and that one people search site listing is the only place our names appear together on the internet.

My ex and I dated until a couple months after I moved to my current city and to my current home (the same one as in the search results), several years ago. He visited me once before we broke up. We didn't have anything intertwined- finances, leases, nothing. We never bought anything together. We were actually explicitly careful about keeping our relationship private due to a situation with one of his prior exes. The only kind of interaction we had with any government entity was that he got pulled over for speeding while driving my car once, in a different state, many years before I moved to my current city. Our relationship was on its last legs after I moved, so I really don't think I put his name down as an emergency contact or when signing up for something. He's extremely private and has very little web footprint, which makes this even more striking. I would be absolutely shocked to learn that he used my contact information for anything, either accidentally or maliciously- it wouldn't be like him.

Where do these sites (or ThatsThem.com specifically) get their information, that could be a plausible way for our information to have gotten mixed up like this?

posted by anonymous to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

The data brokers that power those sites often buy customer lists from all sorts of businesses, including restaurants, hotels, etc. If you so much as let your ex use your cell phone to order delivery pizza, you risk commingling of data.
posted by faster than a speeding bulette at 3:27 PM on September 7, 2020 [10 favorites]

Following up what faster than a speeding bulette said, any piece of data that could have been shared between you and your ex could have led to the page you saw. People finder sites like this one are based on raw data which is almost always incomplete. They may have one record linking Jane Doe to [e-mail], another linking [e-mail] to 123-4567, and another linking 123-4567 to Boulder, Colorado, but there may be no record that links all four details together. However, even though there is no proof that a single person with all of these details exists, the people finder sites will make a page for them under the assumption that they do exist. They would rather make a page for a possibly non-existent person than not make such a page and lose out on traffic from search queries for combinations of details they had no explicit proof for, like "Jane Doe Boulder Colorado". In short, they are incentivized to act as though any connection between two records implies the existence of a person matching both records. Such a connection could be as simple as having an IP address in common because one day both you and your ex ordered something online using the same wifi.
posted by J.K. Seazer at 4:40 PM on September 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

The data brokers that power those sites often buy customer lists from all sorts of businesses, including restaurants, hotels, etc. If you so much as let your ex use your cell phone to order delivery pizza, you risk commingling of data.

I can confirm, somehow family members I don't even have phone numbers to were getting debt collector calls. Besides not knowing about the minor debt and being pissed it was screwing up my credit, I managed to track down how they got it.

I ordered something for my mom and put her contact information down. She did something similar to my brother, who did something similar to my cousin. My cousin got called.

So not only did I have the fun discussion that I was not in serious financial ruin with family members I did not feel comfortable talking to about this, the debt collectors got my information from them. I believe this is called "skip tracing" with the insinuation that you're skipping out on something. As far as I'm aware it goes beyond debt now to just anyone who has money the information is up for grabs.
posted by geoff. at 4:55 PM on September 7, 2020 [4 favorites]

Came here to post the optout list metabaroque put there. These data sites are unreliable in exactly the way others describe. I opted out of as many as I could last year - you can too, it costs nothing but you should know that it can take a couple weeks or longer for them to process your request.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 11:56 PM on September 7, 2020