Did you know about Google Feature?

Beware the New Google Feature!

http://www.google.com

Type your home telephone number into Google's search bar & click the search button . . . MapQuest returns with a physical location of your phone number.

People could use this feature to locate your home address, and receive explicit directions on how to get there from anywhere in the country.

You can remove your name off this database

To do this: Type in your full phone number -- using dashes -- like this: 555-123-4567.

If your number appears in the mapping database, an icon resembling a telephone will appear to left of the entry on the results page.

Click on this icon and it will take you to a page containing a description of the service, and a link to request your number be removed!

Recheck your phone # to be sure it has been removed. Also, if you have children, please check their phone # too!

This is another example of invasion of privacy, isn't it?

Didn't work for me...

I typed in 555-123-4567 just like you said, and got almost 6,000 sites in the search results, but no mapquest........

For what it's worth, this is not the least of Google's creepy Big-Brother privacy violations; for years, every search you make on Google is logged on their servers.

Yes, every Google search - ever - logged with the search criteria, date, time, and WHO performed the search, is sitting on a hard drive somewhere.

If the government had such an efficient way to keep track of us, we'd all be in a big mess.

Use http://www.alltheweb.com I don't know what creepy privacy violations THEY commit, but they're not Google.

"Your search - 416-876-**** - did not match any documents. "

Damn!

(no, I'm not giving out my phone number on Tiki Central!)

My phone number is unlisted, and doesn't turn up on Google. The Gavin Newsom phone-bankers in Kansas can find me, though.

Has anyone tried searching on 867-5309?

Here's an even cooler (creepier?) one:

http://www.anywho.com -- Reverse Lookup tab:

Click on the "Reverse Lookup" tab. Enter in a phone number and get the name and address of the number's owner (if it's listed).

Here's the cool part: if the street is listed, click on the street name to see the addresses and phone numbers of ALL THE PEOPLE ON THAT STREET (who have listed phone numbers).

This is great for finding out your neighbor's phone numbers.

So before you start to freak at the privacy issues here, remember, the phone company allows you to not list your address, or your phone number all together, if you don't want.

Anywho.com also has the map feature. (And by the way, I don't think google has a direct phone-number-to-address feature, I just think it happened to index some Mapquest pages of addresses -- my 2 cents).

~Hanford

[ Edited by: hanford_lemoore on 2003-08-07 14:47 ]

On 2003-08-07 13:06, tikibars wrote:
Yes, every Google search - ever - logged with the search criteria, date, time, and WHO performed the search, is sitting on a hard drive somewhere.

Where did you hear this?

By the way, I saw their privacy policy, and yes it says they save date time, and IP address, but they don't say they save that WITH the query information. Most all webservers (including the one tikicentral.com is running on) save the date, time, and IP address of everyone who accesses it for server logs, although in Tikiroom.com's case, those logs are indexed then thrown out on a daily basis, and only the totals are saved. (names, addresses, email addresses, etc cannot be collected by webserver logging tools)

~Hanford

EDIT: Nevermind, I just saw where they say it's saved with the query. I need to learn to read better.

[ Edited by: hanford_lemoore on 2003-08-07 14:58 ]

I try it to see if it was true and sure it is. This is what it looks like.

The links on the right takes you to the map to show how to get to the address.

The good things is that you can ask them to take you off.

Blessings
Pentaclegoddess

Our number only lists the sitar school that used to have our number. Strangely enough, there's sitar bits in the U,B & O song playing right now. Weird.....

On 2003-08-07 14:47, hanford_lemoore wrote:
Here's an even cooler (creepier?) one:

http://www.anywho.com -- Reverse Lookup tab:

Here's the cool part: if the street is listed, click on the street name to see the addresses and phone numbers of ALL THE PEOPLE ON THAT STREET (who have listed phone numbers).

I try the anywho.com and that is way too Kreepy!

This recent article about google is pretty fascinating: http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/06/25/google/index_np.html

Pyracy Pub - the Piratical Forum
http://pyracy.com/forums

Cool, thanks for the screen grab. I tried several phone numbers and was not able to get it to work.