Safe Shepherd Launches Public API and the Death of Online Privacy in Landmark Study

http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20130514-910275.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Safe Shepherd (http://www.safeshepherd.com), a service that crawls the web, finding and deleting personal information, today announced the launch of their public API for integration into other systems, along with a study of the 290 million unique records of 24 million Americans the service has been used to find so far.

These records are defined as one person's complete information -- such as their home address, family members and phone number, on a people-search or data-broker website. The study found that residents of Texas had the most information available about them, with over 22 million records existing on 1.8 million residents -- an average of 12.52 records per person. Tennessee followed (5.7m records on 469,000 people, 12.29pp), then Alabama (4.1 million records on 338,000 people, 12.26pp), Kentucky (3.9 million records on 321,000 people, 12.23pp), and Ohio (11 million records on 908,000 people, 12.23pp).

"For $10, anyone is able to buy the personal information of another person, and this data is the tip of the iceberg," said Robert Leshner, CEO of Safe Shepherd. "We estimate there're over 4 billion records available -- these are just the ones we've found in private using our API."