Harrison Tang, founder of Spokeo.com, an online information broker, answered some questions via e-mail in addition to agreeing to a phone interview. Read the Tell Mel column about Spokeo.com and information brokers HERE and the e-mail Q&A below:
> When was the company founded?
We were founded in April 2006. We started out of my Stanford dorm room, and the original concept was to help streamline people’s digital identities. We kept evolving our technology based on our user’s
feedback, and we launched the current version (the version that a lot of people have been talking about) only one month ago.
> What’s the size of the database/how many customers/how many employees?
We gather information from a wide variety of sources, and a lot of information may overlap each other. As a result, we don’t have a meaningful metric for the size of our database, but we do have hundreds of millions of records. We have a total of 8 people (yes, it’s not a typo) so far, but we are actively expanding our team to better serve our growing user base.
> How do you get the information?
We gather information from various public sources. For example, you can get someone’s address and phone number from MSN’s WhitePages or ZabaSearch, and you can find all the housing & neighborhood statistics on Zillow. Spokeo does not create or generate information. Spokeo only aggregates it.
> I noticed a number of things in my profile were inaccurate, why is that?
Spokeo aggregates information from other sources. Everything is done automatically (this is why an 8-people team can tackle this hard problem), and there is no human-editing involved. As a result, if one of the sources publishes bad or outdated information for any reason, Spokeo will show the information as-is. We are actively working on new algorithms to improve the data accuracy, but as we’ve disclosed on
our blog many times, Spokeo’s current version is still in public Beta, so we need time to improve it further.
> What’s the purpose of compiling this information and making it available?
We were listening to our user feedback as we designed the product, and people were suggesting various kinds of data we could put together to make our technology more useful. There are A LOT of people search services out there, but the reason why people don’t talk about them is
that they can’t actually find the person they are looking for. People search is a very hard problem to solve, and we were just trying our best to think outside of the box and deliver something that works.
> For example, why would an Astrological sign be included in a profile?
Maybe you and I don’t believe in astrological readings, but millions of people do in various degrees. Astrology.com is one of the biggest websites, and people use astrology to get a rough sense of others’
personalities.
> What about safety concerns? For example, a woman in her mid-70s, who lives alone and her address shows up, couldn’t that be a problem?
From Day 1, we have an one-step opt-out feature on our Privacy page (http://www.spokeo.com/privacy). We’ve also been actively listening to user feedback to fine-tune our service, and we’ve taken off both
the full address and the Google Street View from our free site now. Most of the people search services do not have an easy opt-out procedure, and the fact that we’ve spent a lot of time making sure that legitimate opt-out requests get processed immediately shows our commitment to privacy.
> How many requests do you get for removing the information from the databases?
We process tens of thousands of requests each day.
> How long does it take to get out of the database if you make a request?
The opt-out request requires an email verification step to make sure that you are not a malicious robot trying to delete our entire database. Once you authenticate you are indeed human, the request
takes effect “immediately”.
> Is there a centralized removal procedure, similar to Do Not Call, where a person could be removed from all information broker lists?
We are not aware of any centralized removal procedure that allows you to opt out of other third-party databases. In fact, we are one of the few who has an easy opt-out procedure for everybody.
> Is your business subject to any governmental regulation or oversight?
We are not aware of any such regulation. We publish information that other companies have published for years. Our only innovation is the better organization of the same information, making it much more
accessible to you and me.
> How much competition is there in this business?
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of people search services (Intelius, WhitePages, ZabaSearch, Mylife, … to name a few). In this regard, we have a lot of competition.  On the other hand, you can see that our product feels very different from others, and this is because we are committed to push the technical frontier. Similar to the Google mission statement, our goal is to make public people-related information accessible to not just the privileged few, but to everyone. We will never act as a copycat, and we will continue to innovate.
> What distinguishes Spokeo from its competition?
There is really nothing else like Spokeo right now. There will be something like Spokeo in a few months since there is nothing to stop other people from gathering the same information and copying our user interface. That said, since Spokeo just came out, no one has caught up yet.
At the end, I want to clear up the truths from the myths. In terms of data, Spokeo is nothing new; in fact, as you’ve been aware of, we have a lot to improve in terms of data accuracy. What’s new about Spokeo
is the way it organizes and presents the data. In a way, Spokeo is like iPhone. IPhone did not invent smartphones, and it did not invent mobile email or mobile browser. What it did is to package all the
smartphone capabilities in a way that even our parents can use it. The innovation that Spokeo or iPhone brings is the ease of accessibility for the general public.
