Cyber Security Basics for Women - People Finders & You

➡️ People Finders & You

Ladies, prepare to be horrified.

Pop your number in here

https://www.truepeoplesearch.com

In the tech world, we call this PII (personal identifying information) which is basically any nugget of info that is connected to or directly traceable to you. It’s important for us to train on this because keeping information private is a huge deal for many companies, legally mostly, but sometimes morally. Sometimes.

It’s wild just how much PII is readily available online. I had asked around about the legality of all this and unfortunately, especially in the United States, there are not a lot of protection. So much of your data is considered public records and by proxy available to anyone with two seconds or a couple of bucks. These sites are known as "Data Broker" sites and make a ton of money of scrubbing your information off the internet and public records to create a profile on you, and sell that information to companies who want to use that to make money with that demographic information.

When a scrote is out to doxx (doxxing = looking up someone's PII to post online and /or do harm), 80% of their toolkit consists of these sites. What they can and will do with your info varies. They can use this information to stalk and harass you, obviously. Some will spam your phone / email / home by signing you up for horrible things. Sometimes they will harass your family and friends since some of these sites will list your close associates. And often this information can be used to reset passwords via generic security questions (What street did you grow up on?).

Outside these public websites, many companies have access to databases with tons of information on you as well. A friend of mine got transferred to the fraud department of his company and was given access to one such database as a resource for his investigations. This is a consumer electronics company; one that you wouldn’t think would have access to this information, but there it is. After he saw just how much info was available, he promptly deleted all his social media and said he’d never sign up again. He wouldn’t give me much more than “They have everything”.

Likewise, an acquaintance used to work for a law firm and used such a database to find a long-lost cousin who had gone into exile due to personal issues within the family. While that reunion had a happy ending, it’s still a very eye-opening detail that they were able to do this.

That’s one of the reasons why I say that it’s impossible to avoid every doxxing scenario because so much of it is out of our hands, and we can’t rely on integrity and hope that people with this access are well-meaning.

But let's focus on what we can control.

➡️ What can you do:

Step one is to make a ritual of visiting the people finder sites and requesting them to take down your information. To find the sites, search for terms like “people finder” “phone number search” and “public records”. Start from the top and work your way down. Top hits are gonna be the ones low-effort trolls will use, so that’s the best and easiest way to start.

Unfortunately, there are hundreds of these sites and not a lot of protects. Several bills have been introduced (In the US), but not many passed just yet. However many sites will still give you the option to request your information be removed, even the ones where the info is behind laughably cheap paywalls. It most instances they may reserve the right to deny the request.

Residents of California or countries/regions that actually care about their citizens may also have more to work with. More info here.

To find out where to request removal, scroll down to the bottom of the website and look for those lists of links (called a sitemap). Search for privacy policies, FAQ pages, help, support, etc. When you’re on a webpage, you can search for key terms by pressing command + f (Mac) or control + f (Windows), and search for “remove /removal”, "delete / deletion" and/or “opt-out” to quickly find the information. They will provide links to directions on what you need to do. Reminder most will disclaim that removal is not a guarantee and can take time.

Step two is to get good at searching for yourself. If you wanna get real True Crime about it, put yourself in the mindset of a scrote looking to do harm. What information would be the most useful to cause damage? What information would you least want people to know about you or could potentially be used as blackmail? Think outside the box, too. Your edgy teen joke on an old Twitter account may not have aged well, and this is the sort of stuff someone could try to get you canceled for and fired from your job. It happens all the time when folks piss off the wrong people.

Start with the basics like just your name, number, and email. You will often find profiles from long-forgotten sign-ups, or sometimes RSS feeds that pulled your information from other sites. They are annoying but they are out there. It’s a good idea to get back into old accounts and either delete them if you don’t use them or start removing any identifiable information. If you have completely lost access, it’s worth reaching out to the site admin and asking for the account to be removed as well.

Once you get through that, you can start looking up more abstract things; old aliases, screen names, emails, etc. The goal is to find and remove whatever public data you have on yourself that you can.

Lastly, learn about search operators (Google-Fu) and how to use these in your searches to filter and narrow them down.

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433

Alright fam, that’s a lot for the first post! Please give me your feedback and let me know what topics you’d like to know more about. Also if you have any follow-up questions.

This was originally going to be an overview with a few subjects but as I was writing I realized there was way more information to share than I could fit in one post, so I am breaking it down into multiple parts. It’s also gonna be long, sorry not sorry. This is important info.

My Experience: I’ve worked in IT for over 7 years, much of that was tech support for consumer electronics. I currently work IT for a large company. I am a life-long tech nerd millennial who grew up on the internet and one-upping my parents, and I also had my LiveJournal raided by 4chan. So I have a lot of experience with this on both ends.

Disclaimer: This is meant to be general experience-based advice, and I am by no means a legally bound security advisor. Please use common sense and do research. No amount of proactive security sweeps can prevent all doxxing - I will go into that later. I have experience but I'm not perfect. Also, I’m not responsible if things don’t work out, yada yada. You know the drill.

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Update July 12

Great thoughtful comment on the risk of asking for removal got me thinking and led me to dig a little deeper. I'm going to post extra resources on the subject as I find them.

So far what I'm seeing is that most still feel the information being publically available is a higher risk and you should take steps towards removing it. I will post anything I find that says otherwise. I really wanna dig deeper into this.

Source 1: https://www.consumerreports.org/personal-information/how-to-delete-your-information-from-people-search-sites-a6926856917/

Source 2/3: Experion can suck it but it's still good information: https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/what-are-people-search-sites/ | https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/how-to-remove-your-information-from-people-search-sites/

Source 4: PopSci does a good job of outlining the reality, and whether or not it's worth your time https://www.popsci.com/remove-data-people-finder/