How did Reunion.com know we were related?

November 11, 2008 9:56 AM

My wife discovered our names and "locations" (defined here as city and state) on a shady website called Reunion.com (Wikipedia). I know we've probably been scraped from a variety of online resources, but her so-called "profile" includes the names of her parents and siblings, as well as my parents and my brother. How did Reunion.com make this association?

I know that data about me exists out there, including my address, because I have purchased things online. A Google search has turned up numerous complaints about Reunion.com, citing a lack of privacy and lack of consent to publicly display personal data.

What I am interested in is how Reunion.com seemingly knows who we are related to. Is it a case of someone falling for the trap of registering and filling in the blanks? Each relative has the correct location, and in some cases, age. I don't know of any relative on either side of the family who has extensive knowledge of the other, at least as far as knowing ages and locations. There are dozens of people with the same name, but while they are listed in a sidebar of "similar matches" they are not in the person's profile under "relatives."

It doesn't appear to be the case of my wife having my last name, because she found herself under her maiden name. Yet under her profile are my relatives. Did they dig through the trash to find an old wedding invitation? How did they associate her with my brother?

In retrospect, Reunion.com does not state that Name X under my wife's profile is her brother-in-law. Still, the fact that he is listed there indicates there's some weight attached to his name in terms of proximity to my wife. My name is not under her profile, but I do appear to have my own profile with no relatives. Reunion.com apparently believes I am not related to anybody?

I first thought that perhaps my name is too common for Reunion.com to make any association, but my dad's name is just as common, and yet he's connected somehow.

Related to this is how one would remove themselves from this public listing, without having to contact the company and essentially confirm the veracity of their data, since I wouldn't want to give the false impression that I am a member of their site.

posted by CancerMan to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Best answer: Your address history, which is more-or-less publicly available to people willing to pay for it, is useful for generating these kinds of connections. So someone who shares your name who has lived with you before is likely to be a relative, and it's pretty easy to figure out whether that person is a parent, sibling, or spouse depending on their address history.

Given a group of people's address histories, which would probably include things like previous names, it should be possible to suss out most of the familial relationships between then without too much difficulty.

In terms of how you remove yourself from such a database... good luck with that. The site may or may not have a privacy policy which even has a procedure for such a complaint, and they may or may not follow it. If they don't have such a policy, or they choose not to follow it, there isn't a lot that can be done. The only thing you might do is to contact credit reporting agencies and request that they stop giving out this information, but I don't know how much luck you'll have there.
posted by valkyryn at 10:07 AM on November 11, 2008

Addresses matching names (and birth years, and multiple people with matching last names at the same address, etc.) can easily be scraped from Zaba.
posted by mattbucher at 10:12 AM on November 11, 2008

I've been getting tons of emails from this site in the last month or so, but I thought it was just random spam. Upon further inspection, they've got me in the database, along with my parents. What's interesting about that, though, is that they've got my old address, from when I lived with my parents--when I was a minor. That seems a little disconcerting.
posted by metalheart at 10:19 AM on November 11, 2008

Oh, a thing to try is to contact information through their Whois.
posted by metalheart at 10:20 AM on November 11, 2008

Reunion.com has been around for a really long time in Internet terms. Is she _sure_ she didn't sign up like 10 years ago and hasn't just forgotten about it?
posted by Laen at 10:27 AM on November 11, 2008

I was surprised to find myself there (as I'm in the UK). They have a photo and my name, which has definitely been scraped from my Facebook profile (about three months ago, judging by the profile). I can't see any more information, without signing up, but I bet they could go through my friends list, and their friends lists, and make connections that way.
posted by cincinnatus c at 11:44 AM on November 11, 2008

Best answer: Privacy is dead, get over it. Thanks to all the data everyone puts out on the net, it becomes increasingly easy to piece together data on just about anyone.
posted by bjrn at 12:43 PM on November 11, 2008

And Zaba has tons of entirely illegal data. I used to think one day someone would be killed, there would be a lawsuit, and things would change a teeny bit. Then I realized people have probably already died.
posted by Lesser Shrew at 6:00 PM on November 11, 2008