PREFACE: I sent the company behind DataPatrol a letter about this - and I will publish their reply later, but the service is still basically the same, and the results they provide just as lacking in relevance

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As part of my "goodies" from Natwest (my bank) I got a free subscription to DataPatrol - a service that describes itself

and as a "revolutionary service" that :

(Click for larger image)

So I signed up a month ago -and added my online identities, email addresses and so on, and waited for results to come back.

3 weeks later they still had not found anything about me or the area I live in at all!

(Try looking for my name in Google and you will get thousand of hits).

So this started making me slightly suspicous - if the service was that simple, how could they live up to any of their claims of protecting me?

But then, after a month they sent me their first email, claiming they had found

Your DataPatrol has found items of your personal information online that could put you at risk.

Log in to your DataPatrol account from the NatWest members area here to take action.

So I logged in and found that the number of items they had found on me had suddenly gone up from 0 to 98! This gave me hope until I started looking at the sites where they claimed to have found personal details on me :

Hm! This site does not seem to be about me?

And this site is about the Toronto Maple leafs, so i do agree the words "Tor" (my name) appears in there

And then they offer :

In other words this site seems to just to a simple partial match scan for my name using a search engine, and applying no intelligence or even simple context matching to check that the page is about a human.

IMHO - a completely useless service.

And to add insult to injury their service is also supposed to give me a average price for properties in my neighbourhood - and apparently this is :

I did a scan of a couple of property websites and found lots of houses very close to us for sale.

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