Friday, June 3, 2011

People Search, Phishing, MyLife, and All That

I recently wrote about getting information from the naive, though I phrased more harshly. This was at  http://martesmartes.blogspot.com/2011/04/how-to-get-personal-information-from.html. Then last week I saw a TV ad for mylife.com, offering to show a person who is searching for him or her.

First, I don't know how they can do this without the cooperation of Google or some of the alternative search engines. MyLife seems to be the same as the previously-discussed phishing sites. It asks for personal information, shows a picture of the user's neighborhood from Google Streetview, and then offers to to take a credit card number for outrageous ($13 per month and up) fees to provide results.

There is, however, an inconspicuous little link in the upper right to continue with free, limited access. I clicked. First, it took me to my profile--my fault, I entered personal info. How do I delete it? However, the page was surprising, with links to a couple family members and my ex-wife. I seriously dislike this site.

There was a link to my profile, but no option to delete. However, I was able to edit my profile, but the only meaningful field worth changing was my birthdate, which I changed to a wildly inaccurate value.

This site goes into my hosts file mapped to 127.0.0.1.

My best guess is that it the for-pay tell me who is searching for me feature, is simply internal: a record of people who have searched for me from within mylife.com. So, ultimately, it's a phishing site that thinks it's yet another redundant social media site.

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