Does Spokeo notify the person you search for?

Searching someone

Spokeo's own help material states that searches are private and confidential, and every independent removal guide we cross-checked reports the same. There is no notification, no viewer log shown to the subject, and no way for someone to see that their profile was opened.

This is not a courtesy. It is how the product works: the person being searched is not the customer and has no account, so there is nobody to notify. That asymmetry is the entire business model, and it is a better reason to distrust the category than any notification feature would be.

Opting out

The reverse question comes up just as often, usually from people worried that removing themselves will draw attention. It does not. Submitting a suppression request does not notify anyone who previously viewed your profile, and there is no alert to third parties that a listing has been taken down.

The one message generated is the confirmation email sent to the address you supply, which is what completes the request. It goes to you and nobody else.

What actually reveals a search

If you are worried about being noticed, these are the real mechanisms, none of which are Spokeo notifying anyone.

• Contacting the person afterwards using information only the report could have given you. This is the one that gives people away.
• Shared payment methods. A subscription charge on a joint statement is visible to whoever else reads it.
• A shared or logged-in device carrying the search in browser history.
• Looking someone up on a platform that does have view notifications and conflating it with Spokeo. Some professional networks tell people who viewed their profile; people-search sites do not.

What Spokeo may not be used for

More consequential than the notification question, and rarely mentioned alongside it. Spokeo states it is not a consumer reporting agency and that its reports may not be used for employment, tenant or credit decisions.

That position has history behind it. In June 2012 Spokeo paid $800,000 to settle FTC charges that it had marketed consumer profiles to the human-resources, background-screening and recruiting industries in violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. It was the FTC's first case addressing the sale of internet and social-media data for employment screening. The same complaint alleged Spokeo had posted endorsements written by its own employees while presenting them as independent reviews.

So if the reason you are searching is to screen a job applicant or a prospective tenant, the answer about notification is beside the point. That use is what the FCRA regulates, and this is not a tool licensed for it.

The reverse case is worth knowing too. If you were turned down for a job, a tenancy or credit and you suspect a people-search profile was behind it, the FCRA gives you rights that a people-search site cannot satisfy: to be told an adverse decision was based on a report, to see the report, and to dispute what is wrong in it. A landlord or employer who made that decision from a Spokeo profile has skipped a process the law requires, and an inaccurate profile is precisely where that becomes concrete. Ask directly what the decision was based on, and put the question in writing.

If you are here because you were looked up

A fair share of people arrive at this question from the other direction, having realised how much of their own life is sitting on a page they never created. Spokeo's opt-out is free and takes about five minutes.