Consumer beware: MyLife look-ups are a lousy deal

You’ve probably seen the Facebook ads for MyLife, which pitch you to enter your name to see what’s publicly available about you and who’s been looking for it. When you click through, they ask for not only your name, but also your age and location. Once you enter all of this information (but not before), they show you bogus blurred photos of people who they say are looking for you, and then solicit your email address if you want to actually see anything more. (You can even let them connect to your Facebook account, if you’re feeling really brave.) Once you’ve given them your email address, you learn that, in fact, no more free information is actually forthcoming. Instead you need to pay $15.95 to see your own profile.

Here’s the kicker: anything you enter as part of this process apparently becomes part of the profile they can connect with your email address in their database. This was confirmed in a note from their customer service department: ”If the site is asking you to provide a email address in our sign up that means you are creating a free user profile, in that event yes you would be added to our database.” This doesn’t jump out at you from their privacy policy, and certainly isn’t prominently disclosed anywhere an unsuspecting consumer might see it.

It gets worse. In their privacy policy, MyLife even reserves the right to share your email address with “third party co-marketing partners if we believe they have an offer that would be of interest to you.” Swell.

In short, MyLife asks you to build their database about you while giving you nothing in return unless you pay. Doesn’t sound to me like a very good deal.

PS I sure wish Facebook would make some effort to police these deceptive ads, particularly since they thrive on curiosity about your own Facebook profile.