AboutUs.org is a wiki that gathers WHOIS information and aggregates it in one place, including addresses, phone numbers, fax numbers, and email addresses.
Before you start posting comments that remind me that Whois information is public, let me just stop that now. For starters, i paid extra to keep my domain registration private via proxy (something I shouldn’t have had to do in the first place), but that was put into place AFTER I initially registered the domain. Second, WHOIS information is NOT spidered by Google, but AboutUs.org IS spidered by Google, which means that if you are listed on their site, all of your private information including home address, phone number, email – all of it — is now available via Google search.
Third, and most important, my information was posted without any notification or my knowledge, and there’s no way to unring the dang bell.
From Day One of this site I’ve explained why I use a pseudonym and left contact information on the site for anyone who wants to contact me via email to verify my identity. That should have sufficed.
But here’s why they’re really evil: There is a posted privacy policy on the site that includes a dead link to a page explaining how to remove your personal information from their database. In fact, just about all of the links on the site that would be helpful to edit and/or remove information are dead. They are covertly “outing” as many people as they can with no recourse to have that information removed.
This is EVIL. It’s dangerous. I should have the right to express myself without being concerned that my children and/or husband will be affected, tainted, endangered or otherwise bothered by what I, and I alone, write on this site. It is a subtle form of censorship which will certainly change how I approach certain subjects that I’ve written about in the past.
Really, someone needs to sue them. Before someone else gets hurt.
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