How Easily Can Someone Access Your Name, Address and Home Buying History?

In the “old” days, if you wanted to find out what property someone owns, what they paid for it and how much they owe every year in property taxes, you could drive to the county offices during business hours on a weekday and ask the clerk to search the public records.

But these days, that information is just a few clicks away on a real estate records website called BlockShopper.com.

Last week I wrote a about KGO radio talk show host Gil Gross moving to Novato. In the comments section, the issue of privacy came up. It got me to thinking about what information is out there on the Internet, not just about public figures, but the rest of us, too.

If you’ve ever searched for yourself online, you probably know that your name, address and maybe phone number are easy to find. Sites like WhitePages.com or 411.com even return information like your approximate age and the names of people closely associated with you, such as a spouse.

These websites learn about us from public sources (such as published phone directories, other websites and likely county records) as well as third-party “data suppliers.” These third parties buy and sell our personal information, which they often get from … us! A common source of their data is information that we provided — either online or offline — when filling out forms for contests, sweepstakes, subscriptions, trial offers, etc. The disclosures are in the fine print.

It seems the ready availability of this personal information on the Internet is widely accepted now as “the way it is.” But BlockShopper.com, which reports data in 23 local markets in the U.S., pushes the envelope a bit further, providing a new level of “access” that makes many people uncomfortable.

When you type your name and city into a search engine like Google, BlockShopper is usually one of the websites that comes up (often as the first or second search result, pretty powerful). If it’s a Bay Area address, you’ll see it as “sf.blockshopper.com.” Click through and you can find your address, what you paid for your house and who you bought it from and when. It also shows what your property taxes are. Anyone can see this information.

Again, this is all public record, but Blockshopper is the first real estate, for-profit website to link this data (names + addresses) and put it all out there in this way, at least that I know of. Other real estate sites, such as Trulia and Zillow, list the sales history of homes, but do not include the buyer nor seller’s names.

BlockShopper goes even further, too. Besides names and addresses, they also publish something they call “Local News” stories,” which read like actual news briefs that report when someone buys or sells a house. These stories reveal the buyer or seller’s profession and sometimes their photo as well. These are private citizens, not public figures.

One headline on the site is, “Dentist Buys Novato West of 101 4 BD for 1.747M.” Here’s the brief, which I edited to exclude the last names and addresses that BlockShopper provides:

“Christian X bought a four-bedroom, 4.5 bath home at (address) in Novato from Mr. and Mrs. Y for $1.7475 million on April 5.

The Ys paid $869,909 for the property in Oct. 2003. The 3,910-square-foot house was built in 2006.

Dr. X practices dentistry at (Marin practice name). He also works as a part time faculty member at (a university's school of dentistry).

He earned his dental degree from (university) and completed his endodontic residency in Marin County.”

Sounds like a real news story, right? It even included a photo of the dentist. But no one was interviewed for this story. On its website, BlockShopper says its “news stories only include information that’s already been made publicly available on the Web.”

In doing some research, it seems they cull the info from Facebook, MySpace and professional networking sites like Linked In.

BlockShopper bills itself as “one part community newspaper, one part ultimate hyper-local real estate research tool.” But critics feel uneasy.

There are complaints on consumer advocacy websites with person after person complaining about the way the website presents the public information it collects.

On consumeraffairs.com , someone named Mike from Corte Madera had this to say about a “news story” written about him:

“I recognize that much of this information is public, but combining this info and representing it as ‘Company X product manager bought a house for Y’ at this address is completely inappropriate. The use of my company's name with my personal information is not company news. I use Linkedin to share information about my work history for the context networking, business relationships, etc. I do not share my info with Linkedin so it can be combined with my personal real estate purchase information.”

Several anti-BlockShopper websites have also popped up. The owner of one site doesn’t mince words.   

“Blockshopper scumbags…(founders) Brian Timpone and Edward Edward Weinhaus mine pubic data and post it for their personal profit, with a complete and total disregard for personal privacy and the well being of others. Their "brief articles" are nothing more than a cheesy search engine optimization ploy that mines Linked-in and other personal profile information and posts it on their site to increase their internet traffic through key words.

This isn't a free speech issue…it's about privacy and not having your address show up in Google and having every…stalker and nutcase know where you and your family live. While it is true that the information may be posted on assessor's pages, these pages are not indexed by Google.”

The issue of internet privacy is making headlines right now here in California. As reported in today's SF Chronicle, there is newly proposed legislation that could force Facebook and other social-networking sites to change their privacy protection policies. Under the proposal, SB242, social-networking sites would have to allow users to establish their privacy settings (like who can view their profile) when they register to join the site instead of after they join.

Many internet companies are against this proposal and who knows whether this legislation, if passed, could end up impacting some of BlockShopper’s research.

Meanwhile, I think BlockShopper could quiet a lot of the controversy if it would provide an “opt-out” feature like some other sites apparently do (like White Pages).  But it seems the company is unwilling to do this even when people repeatedly ask.

So, I’ll put it out to the Novato Patch community: Does BlockShopper cross the line between privacy and public information in the way it presents the data? Or is it all fair game since the info is in the public domain anyway?