Blockshopper PII Removal Tips Needed

[LittleScoobyMaster]

Sometimes it helps cybersecurity practices by keeping your personal information off the web but Blockshopper.com doesn't seem to be very cybersecurity friendly as they do not remove home owners information from their website unless you are in law enforcement, under an order of protection, or consider yourself under some other threat. Curious what tips people have to offer to successfully remove your personal information from Blockshopper.com. All tips are helpful.

There are quite a few websites that document people's complaints against the site and how they do not honor Opt Out information requests:

BlockShopper.com - Won't remove home listings from Google search

These guys will not entertain opt out requests or in the least removing your personal information from being indexed by the Google search crawler. As a result, when someone Googles your name, the first thing people see in the result page is the price of your property. This is wrong because most...

www.complaintsboard.com

Blockshopper.com Reviews: Written By Customers

I asked Blockshopper to remove my information as there is a certain level of anonymity needed. They flatly said no and didn't address me nicely at all. They were extremely ...

www.consumeraffairs.com

BlockShopper | Complaints | Better Business Bureau® Profile

View customer complaints of BlockShopper, BBB helps resolve disputes with the services or products a business provides.

www.bbb.org

 

[alastairstevenson]

Blockshopper.com doesn't seem to be very cybersecurity friendly

What's this got to do with CCTV?

 

[TonyR]

In fairness, it is posted under "General Talk" => "Cyber Security".

I read some of the links and complaints and I must admit, it is concerning...but it pales in comparison to the the breaches in ethics, lies in journalism and overreach of government and their legislative actions that we are experiencing recently so I placed it on my bottom shelf.

In the interim, I hope one or more of the unhappy complainants in turn posts sensitive info on the owners Timothy Landon, Brian Timpone and Edward Weinhaus...enough so that they get to experience firsthand the issues caused by their greed, selfishness and carelessness.

 

[fenderman]

This information is publicly available via your local government, there is nothing you can do.

 

[LittleScoobyMaster]

In the interim, I hope one or more of the unhappy complainants in turn posts sensitive info on the owners Timothy Landon, Brian Timpone and Edward Weinhaus...enough so that they get to experience firsthand the issues caused by their greed, selfishness and carelessness.

The data dump for the Timpone family and many known relatives is here (scroll down a few pages):

BlockShopper.com - Invasion of Privacy

This is a new complaint against Blockshopper.com. This website, which supposedly provides "content, " is actually scraping people's profiles, including PRIVATE, profiles. I write this as one of the people that they posted an article about. My issue and complaint is that the career info that wa...

www.complaintsboard.com

And in fact, a few users have had success with Blockshopper removals from contacting Blockshopper relatives.

Although most of the info that Blockshopper posts is public information, most websites have better ethics and typically remove PII for users who request it. Blockshopper is the main exception in my experience. According to complaints, they also do not always remove private information that they post on people. They were sued by a 2000+ attorney group back in 2009 but from what I can tell all Blockshopper got was what sounded like $110,000 in attorney fees and maybe some other settlement. Blockshopper was linking house information to attorneys at a law firm's profile pages with their job descriptions, etc. At the time Blockshopper made it sound like the issue was all about the right to link to a URL on a website, but the bigger problem really to me seems to be that Blockshopper is so sloppy with PII, which back then wasn't as big of deal as it is today with GDPR, etc. I hope that a new lawsuit against Blockshopper happens soon. California has a few new GDPR-like laws that will be interesting to see tested with Blockshopper because a few California residents have already requested PII takedowns due to the new California privacy laws and according to the complaints, Blockshopper is not removing the California resident's information yet.

Jones Day settles lawsuit against small Internet site, defendants say

A small Internet site says it has settled a lawsuit filed by the Jones Day law firm - a suit that ignited criticism from bloggers and free speech advocates across the country. Read the settlementJones Day wanted to stop Blockshopper.com,...

www.cleveland.com

Google has a new PII removal tool that looks promising though. I've been experimenting with it but of course it doesn't help if you go straight to Blockshopper or through a search engine other than Google such as DuckDuckGo, etc.

 

[Smilingreen]

Most counties and cities in the US have a publicly accessible GIS mapping system that you can easily get all that information from. I know our state and county, both have this. We can easily just click on a property on the map and it brings up a full report of all data on the property, what it is zoned for, how much you paid for it, how many times it has been sold, the square footage and some have the interior floor plans, also. This does make it nice for when you go to buy a property. You can tell if someone bought a property cheap a year and a half ago and then decided to triple the asking price in a years time of ownership. Chances are, that is where Blockshopper is getting their data from.

 

[LittleScoobyMaster]

Most counties and cities in the US have a publicly accessible GIS mapping system that you can easily get all that information from.

That is where Blockshopper gets their info from as well, local counties. I've been using GIS maps for over 20 years and the main difference between them and Blockshopper from my experience is that the Blockshopper data shows up in Google searches whereas most GIS data doesn't seem to show up in Google, or at least, to a much less extent than Blockshopper data does. That's a problem because most people are going to type in a name of someone in Google versus attempting to find someone on a GIS site first because it's easier and people tend to gravitate to easy.

Google has a PII Opt Out which I am still testing. Waiting for results:

Report Content On Google - Legal Help

The form is a little cumbersome but if you stick to it you can at least successfully submit a removal request. Still waiting on my submissions to be fulfilled.