Blockshopper enabling stalkers with home owner information website

Blockshopper.com, a place where one can go to obtain information on home sales, is enabling stalkers with its home owner information website.

A good friend  brought the site to this blogger's attention because when that person's name is searched on Google, their personal information on where they live comes up first.

The firm's service covers Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, South Florida, St. Louis, Washingon D.C., and several other cities.

It's scary.

But what's even worse is Blockshopper.com has a legion of people complaining about its practice of posting what it claims is public information on its website. Consumeraffairs.com has several pages devoted to Blockshopper.com's practice, and where the company claims that they have the right to do it. But what's more shocking is the St. Louis-based Blockshopper is not addressing the requests of those who complain that they don't want their information on the site.

What's more, Blockshopper's using its Twitter account to communicate housing transactions on its website. It's here: @blockshopper.

Individuals of small means have no way to make Blockshopper stop. One has to be the size of a company like Jones Day, which successfully sued Blockshopper based on a technicality. This is the description of the firm on the case information webpage:

Founded in 2006, BlockShopper.com is a start-up local online real estate news service covering Chicago, South Florida, Las Vegas, and St. Louis. Its reporting staff is made up of ex-print journalists who collect public real estate sales data, then use information in the public domain (e.g. company web sites) to write news stories about recent transactions. BlockShopper currently produces upwards of 1,000 stories per month and has produced more than 8,000 since its founding, many of which appear in print newspapers as part of content-sharing partnerships with companies like Tribune. Three of those stories, all on BlockShopper's Chicago web site, reported the real estate transactions of partners and associates from Jones Day, the large international law firm.

Jones Day sued BlockShopper.com on Aug. 12, 2008 in federal court in Illinois. The complaint alleges that Blockshopper.com infringed and diluted the firm's service mark and violated state trademark and unfair competition laws by using the word "Jones Day" when referring to the real estate transactions of Jones Day attorneys, linking to its site and using lawyers’ photos from its site. The firm contends that these activities creates the false impression that Jones Day is affiliated with or sponsors BlockShopper.com.

Jones Day was granted a temporary restraining order.

The problem is that while BlockShopper.com claims the information used is "public" it's not easily available via search without the company's website posting. So BlockShopper.com is for all practical purposes making public but not easily obtainable information truly public and easy to get from the perspective of ease of access.

This is a matter for the California Attorney General to wade into.

UPDATE: I received this note below from Blockhopper:

Hi Zennie-- Read your post this morning.

It includes two errors I'd like to call to your attention.

1- We weren't "successfully sued" by Jones Day. To the contrary, they
frivolously sued us and then begged us to let them drop the case after
suffering through several months of terrible publicity.

A renowned First Amendment lawyer took our case pro bono, and the
Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Citizen, among other
pro-free speech groups, organized on our behalf against them.

Jones Day tried to bully us into treating its lawyers differently,
hiding their real estate sales information from the public. They
failed because we stood up to them.

2- Real estate transactions and owner/buyer/seller names are not
"quasi private" information.

They are public, collected and published by county governments for
purposes of guaranteeing title and (fairly) assessing taxes.

To be sure, hiding names of owners/buyers/sellers makes life easier
for mortgage fraudsters and politicians doling out favors, like the
Chicago Congressman caught paying $270 a year in property taxes on his
multi-million dollar home.

You obviously disagree, but we believe this information should be even
more public, not less. We understand there are trade-offs, but we
believe they are worth it.

Thanks for reading, glad to discuss further if you have any interest.

brian

Stay tuned.