nathan jara

Thanks to an anonymous source ; ), I was informed of this website today. It’s called Spokeo. Spokeo touts itself as “a search engine specialized in aggregating and organizing vast quantities of people-related information from a large variety of public sources,” according to it’s about page. Typing in your name may result in a Spokeo hit which reveals things like your full name, location and address pinpointed on a map, phone number, other household members’ names, genders, and ages, your average salary and property value. As you can see, this isn’t exactly the definition of privacy. The site seems to gather it’s info from site’s like Facebook and other social media websites. We already know my feelings on Facebook’s privacy woes. Just goes to show, once you have anything about yourself on the internet, it’s free game. Thankfully, the company does provide a somewhat painless way to remove yourself from their system. You can follow these steps on their help page. You’ll have to confirm the removal with a valid email address and follow up confirmation. However, if you want to remove multiple people, have a couple email addresses handy to use as they only let you remove about two names. I think they should’ve named it SPOOKeo.

So I have a complaint to make. I’m not sure what it’s like these days in the rest of the country, but I’ve come to the conclusion that a good portion of people in western Pennsylvania have lost some fundamental driving principles. It’s amazing. I can’t count the number of times in the past few weeks I’ve encountered others who A. don’t know how to use their turn signal and B. don’t seem to understand the concept of ‘right-of-way.’ I’m not sure if the cars these individuals are driving don’t have turn signals, but if they do, they certainly are too lazy to make an effort to flick the turn signal arm. And when it comes to pulling up to the intersection, these particular drivers don’t realize that whoever is first to the intersection, proceeds through first. Only when two cars arrive at the same time does the person on the right have the ‘right-of-way.’

And just one more thing. Headlights. I am continually amazed that people do not turn on their headlights when it’s raining. First of all, it’s illegal (pg. 66). Second of all, it’s just silly.

Okay. I’m done.