I am an avid supporter in Internet privacy. It took having someone stalk me a few years ago for me to understand the importance of my safety that this topic has. Because of this incident, I now can find little when searching myself online and even found (purposely) false information on some of these sites where I looked myself up.
I think it’s imperative for individuals to think twice about what they are putting out into the World Wide Web before making that immediate call to release it. Its so easy to “fill out a survey” to win something “free” but the sad news is that things are never free. Everything comes with a cost. I think that websites like Spokeo or related are able to gain this information simply and easily. All it takes is handing consumers an enticing object (like “free” money) and letting those individuals do all the work. It is quite scary how easy it seems businesses are able to obtain personal information about millions of individuals.
I think that there is far too much information easily accessible to the world about who we are, where we live, what we do, etc. While I hope that we would have much stricter policies on obtaining personal information, I think it is also up to our own selves to be aware of what and how much information we are giving out.