as already mentioned in the post: opt-in is the secret, not opt-out.

but yes, let’s discuss it on another occasion.

The 123people Site is bilaterally organized. You have to differentiate between the “Profile” Section and the “Found on the Web” Section. With your privacy Settings you can Control your very own “Profile”.

Obviously we cannot influence the “Found on the web” section. This is unfortunately not (yet) possible. The results shown in this Section are made up by Information actually found on the Web. This is not implicitly associated with yourself. Meaning that this simply Crawls the Web after what you put into the Search Field. There is no Distinction made (it’s not really possible) between you and People having the same Name for example…

lukas

Simply Sign up at 123people.com and then go to “Meine Einstellungen” and Set your Privacy Level to “medium” or “low”. Thereafter your Phone Number and Email Adress won’t be shown.

In case you have any questions or you are somehow concerned about the Fact that you have to register in order to change that you can drop me a line via email or post it here…

adios
lukas

could you please set my privacy level that my phone number is not showing up on your site?

thanks!

Dear Maia,

concerning the your Statement regarding the Privacy Controls I must say that this is also a crucial topic for 123PEOPLE. We believe that in nowadays world data storage and privacy are more and more important. This is why you can fully adjust and set your privacy levels at 123PEOPLE. The idea is that you, for yourself, should decide which Information should be viewable by the Public and which not.

I am sure all of us (spock, yasni, etc.) are aware that Privacy should not be tabood, but activelly controlled.

lukas | 123people

i work for 123PEOPLE. we are currently restoring the database why we recently had some troubles with the search results, however, we weren’t prepared for the intense initial popularty the site gained in the first days after the launch.

the search results are improving constantly and for right now are working on several improvements and new crawling databases.

regards to our “friendly competitors” SPOCK.

lukas

to be honest, I wasn’t too sure about this in the first place…I’ve updated the post accordingly. however, I guess it’s right to assume that there is some kind of “seeding” involved, when a person is added to Spock’s index, right? My guess is, that this is done by “following the social graph” of people (in my particular case, one of my Myspace-contacts also shows up on Spock - I just asked this person, and he definitely didn’t signup for Spock - so my guess is, Spock was following my Myspace friends-list to seed his profile).

of course it’s more likely that I’m wrong here

This is Maia, from Spock. I just wanted to thank you for your feedback and remarks.

To clear up some things, most of the 250 million + search results on Spock are actually automatically indexed from the public web and not created by Spock users. Only a small percentage of the information you see on Spock is created by users.

Also, Christian - I’m not sure if your comment was about Spock, but I wanted to let you know that we try to NEVER display personal information like email addresses, phone numbers, and post addresses - even if we find that information on the public web. This is in contrast to Google, which will display and index any information it finds.

We believe strongly in useful privacy controls. I’m glad you like them - do you have any suggestions on how to approve them? Please let me know if you think of anything; either here, or feel free to email me personally.

Thanks,
Maia