Spokeo is a search engine providing more than 18 million unique monthly visitors valuable data records about people.
Spokeo was founded in 2006 by four graduates from Stanford University—Mike Daly, Harrison Tang, Ray Chen, and Eric Liang. The original idea of aggregating social media results came from Tang. The four founders developed the idea in early 2006, using Tang’s parents’ basement. On November 5, 2006, the site officially launched, after attracting an initial round of angel investment in the “low hundreds of thousands” according to co-founder Ray Chen.
The site has evolved to become an information-gathering website that offers various options for finding information about people. It purports to know, among other things, one’s income, religion, spouse’s name, credit status, the number of people in the household, a satellite shot of the house and its estimated value. The company’s revenues for 2014 were $57 million, and as of 2015, the site had 18 million users.
Spokeo utilizes deep web crawlers to aggregate data. Searches can be made for a name, email, phone number, username or address. The site allows users to remove information about themselves through an “opt-out” process that requires the URL of the listing and a valid email address. The firm aggregates information from public records and does not do original research into personal data. It aggregates marketing data approximations into the data it finds from social media and online registry sites. The company gives users access to 12 billion public records. From the Spokeo main landing page, typing in any reverse-search email address – even a completely made up one will result in a suggestion that information has been found and the searcher will be invited to take out a subscription to see the search results.
