I am not a very private person. I do not keep secrets. I am generally pretty open with my opinion, but even I would be reluctant to make my personal information public domain. Spokeo.com is a website that catalogs personal information for public use and one of the major reasons we should be more aware of what we share on the Internet.

The website’s tagline, “Not your grandma’s white pages,” certainly rings true. With just a name, Spokeo allows its users to access not only a person’s full address, but depending on the amount of information available, their relationship status, yearly income, and even their hobbies. For a yearly fee of just over $35, a user can get access to even more.

As members of a post-industrial society in the 21st century, we are all part of a rapidly evolving information age. Information is readily available to anyone able to key in a few words into a Google search bar. While this kind of accessibility is convenient, concepts like information control and protection of privacy are quickly becoming a thing of a past.

Frankly, I find this scary.

Admittedly the issue is a double-edged sword. A free flow of information allows for heightened government transparency, fast-forming social movements, and easy global communication. However, with websites like Spokeo popping up, which make an individual’s personal information public, the ethics of our information-hungry society may need to be called into question.

An important fact to keep in mind is that Spokeo is not the biggest offender in making public personal information. Internet users are.

Using Spokeo, I was able to find extensive information on many of my family members and friends, but information on myself was non-existent. I wasn’t even listed as an existing family member on my father’s otherwise complete family tree.

I can owe this to precautions I’ve taken when dealing with Internet safety: using aliases when my name is not necessary, creating multiple email addresses for mailing lists, and avoiding advertisements — if it is too good to be true, it probably is not.

A born skeptic, I was late coming into the social networking scene and since then I have been careful about privacy settings and what kind of information I publish.

Taking care to cover up digital footsteps is important to avoid being catalogued by sites like Spokeo.

While setting Facebook profiles to public may seem like a good way to reach out to potential friends, it makes any information published there liable to be taken and shared by cataloguing sites like Spokeo. Information published to the Internet can be saved and stored even if it is taken down from the original source.

Rarely do people walk around wearing t-shirts that state their income, phone number, and marital status, so it’s a little confusing as to why people think the Internet is an appropriate place to post these things.

This is why I think that unnecessary information sharing should be kept to a minimum. Avoid money-making survey websites, unfamiliar social networking or dating websites, and mailing lists that require more than just an e-mail address.

Being conscious of who is getting what information about you is important, both in daily life and on the Internet. By taking a conservative approach to what information we share on the Internet, we can avoid being documented by sites like Spokeo.