Panic! Over Online Cell Phone Directory

The privacy minded are taking a skeptical stance toward a company called Intelius: Type in a name, any name, pay $7.95, and get a background report on that person, complete with their birthdate, recent addresses, and phone numbers. In fact, for $7.95 you can look up everyone with that name, as I did to find the 68 Christopher Nulls that live in the U.S. And now I know where they live.

Actually, it's an additional service that has privacy mavens especially concerned: For $14.95 you can input any phone number (even a cell phone or VOIP line) and find out who it belongs to. Considering that cell phone numbers have historically been kept private, that offering has some worried that they'll soon be inundated with marketing calls as their digits get out to the evil world of telemarketers.

I tried both of the above services and they worked largely as promised. A search for my cell phone number did indeed tie it to me as the account owner, but the search for my name didn't have my current address or landline phone number attached to it yet (though I've lived here for two full years). It's not a perfect service, but anyone with a few bucks in their pocket can indeed easily find out just about everything there is to know about someone, even if they're armed only with a first and last name. (Intelius offers additional services, including full background checks that include criminal records, home value, lawsuits, and sex offender reports.) There are, of course, other services like this available... but the cell phone search is new to Intelius.

MSNBC notes not just that this data shouldn't be available in the first place, but that opting out of the Intelius database is difficult to the point of near impossibility. As for me, I'm not overly concerned just yet: That $15 charge seems like a pretty big barrier for those casually looking to connect names to phone numbers, plus there's a little snag that makes this less loathsome than you might think. Namely, you can't type in a name and look up their cell number, you have to do it the other way around. That limits the utility of the service considerably (after all, if I already have the number I could always just call it instead of spending $15 to find out who the owner is).

But maybe I'm just jaded. Ponder this one over your Friday siesta... how does Intelius make you feel?