People search engines

People search engines are online directories containing personal information of people. Although a lot of this information can be considered to be private, most of it is gathered together from publicly accessible sources, such as voter registration lists or social media profiles. Some search engines gather what they can from crawling the web to build up their profiles instead of relying only on selected sources.

Although some people search engines allow people to request opting out, some do not. Additionally, some may charge for the process.

Examples of people search engines are Pipl, Whitepages and Spokeo.

 

Last updated: 3 September 2017