It also said I “may” have bankruptcies and liens, sex offender notices and eviction reports

You can save a step by going straight to the privacy policy (hidden way down, at the bottom of the front page). From there, search for your name (and add the state you live in). Then type in your address and request to be let out. The company adds that it “will not sell the email address that you provide as part of the opt-out process, or use it for any other purpose, siti web incontri militari without your prior consent.”

MyLife

For instance, MyLife told me “you have arrest or criminal records” and offered me the chance to view these, provided I pay $1 for a three-day trial membership that could be canceled only if I called in.

I bit to see what they had. And it turns out I got what MyLife cited as a “minor infraction” traffic ticket in 1991. That’s 27 years ago for what I believe was an illegal U-turn.

Worst of all, after calling on Monday (888-704-1900) to demand my removal from the index and being asked to give my name, street address and birth date, as of Friday evening, everything was still there. A follow-up call said MyLife takes five to seven business days for removal. The other sites had me down in less than a day.

Lawsuits

MyLife is being sued by several consumers, with one group accusing it of bait-and-switching people to pay one fee to find out who is searching for them and then getting extra recurring charges. Another group says MyLife has violated the Illinois Right of Publicity Act, reselling their “addresses, employment histories, criminal records, social media pictures and other sensitive and personal information.” Spokeo was sued for allegedly displaying inaccurate information, and it went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the company.

Meanwhile, what of the data selling? The California Department of Motor Vehicles was in the news recently for pocketing $50 million yearly for reselling motorists’ data to car manufacturers, insurance firms and banks.

A spokeswoman for the DMV, Anita Gore, says the agency is just covering their costs. The data is sold “for legitimate purposes,” she says. What if the clients turn around and resell the data? “Our expectation is that they won’t,” she says.

And if the websites say all the real estate, court and criminal records are, indeed, “public,” why aren’t they displayed on the world’s most-used search engine, Google, instead of being marketed by companies such as MyLife and WhitePages?

Mark Rumold, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the issue of public records in the digital age is a thorny one. “It’s all been publicly accessible but hard to get. You had to show up in person. Now, it’s digitized and there are privacy concerns.”

He adds that there’s no way to “put the genie back in the bottle,” but if consumers are concerned, they should write their local and state lawmakers and complain. Reaching out to federal officials would be a waste of time, as each state has different laws, he notes.

A new law, California Consumer Privacy Act, goes into effect in January and requires companies to fully disclose what personal data has been collected and to make it easier to demand the companies to delete their data.

So look to the people search engines to offer changes in January. Even if they’re not based in California, they do business there, so they’ll need to adapt.