Your personal information from your voting information like your party affiliation, your phone number and address is online by PRIVATE websites like  http://connvoters.com.    Date of birth information is important information for identity theft.  Phone numbers are great for telemarketers.  Your home address is great for stalkers.   Even Connecticut Secretary of  State Denise Merrill, who is in charge of voting in the state is listed.

Is this legal?   The site says “The State of Connecticut provides this information to anybody who wants it.”  Connvoters.com continues “You do not own the information. It is public information. In a free country, anybody may freely communicate true facts lawfully obtained from a public record. Read on for the removal request option.”

There is a link to get your name removed, but to quote the page: “Any comments should be directed to — We do not honor removal requests sent via email and we do not check the emails often.”    Any politician, police officer, judge, anyone who is registered to vote has their information on this and other sites that solicit voter information. Even if you request your information to be taken down it is a request and there is no law requiring them or any other website that  harvests individuals information to take it down.

There are hundreds of websites that  harvest your information, like this list http://www.internetremoval.com/directory/. It has 267 pages with 150 listings per page, that is over 40,000 sites listed.  You will have to check each one to and request your information be removed.  That is if they are in the United States and will comply with your request and our laws.

Granted many of us divulge a lot of personal information on social media sites like Facebook.  But we don’t normally post our phone number or street address.   With sensitive information like your address, phone number and date of birth free for the taking, should our legislators work to make sensitive information like this harder to obtain?   Did you even know your information was going to be shared when you registered to vote?  At least on social media you have the Terms of Service that we usually click “I agree” without reading, but there was no warning that your information was going to be shared when you registered to vote!