By Tobin Barnes
Ever heard of Zillow.com?
If not already, before long, they will have heard of you.
According to the Wall Street Journal, nine-year-olds are using this Internet site to check out the property values of not only their own family’s home, but their little friends’ homes as well. See whose family is really making the big bucks, or at any rate, pretending to.
That’s right, if you’ve got a person’s address, Zillow can “virtually” invite you into their home, in a manner of speaking. And that’s whether the house is for sale or not.
Zillow can give searchers an estimate of what a house is worth, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, the square footage, the lot size, the taxes, construction date, and a fairly close-up satellite view of what it looks like from space.
Don’t worry, people won’t be able to look into your windows, but they will get a pretty good idea of what your neighborhood’s like.
In its data base, Zillow has 67,000,000 homes and counting. As of yet, that doesn’t include homes in my town of Spearfish, SD. Yeah, the Land of Infinite Variety is getting dissed again. There’s evidently bigger fish to fry out there in the real estate world, but surely we’ll also be documented before long. Someone might be entering the figures as I write.
Sound a little creepy, knowing that other people can know so much about you and your castle?
You darned betcha, as we say here in SoDak.
But it’s a wired world now, and you’re part of the circuit, whether you like it or not.
Of course, there are perfectly fine and legitimate uses of this type of information, particularly if you’re looking to buy a home or trying to price yours in relation to other properties in your neighborhood. Then Zillow can be a valuable tool. Use it to find out whose house is way over-priced and/or how over-priced your house should be.
It can also be a treasure trove for snoops like those nine-year-olds. And I have to admit succumbing to the temptation myself.
Not long ago, for entertainment while visiting relatives, we got onto Zillow, entered some addresses and checked out some property values, wondering who was blowing smoke and who had the goods.
Just good clean fun in a sense, yet in a sense, it was snooping nonetheless.
But, you see, the Internet made us do it.
Admit it. How much of your time on the Internet is spent doing similar things? Snooping, that is. As columnist Stacy Schiff writes, “We are no longer reading. We’re searching.”
And searching for precisely what? Not so much knowledge, but more likely information. They are not necessarily the same. Oftentimes, we’re after salty bits of nothing. And it’s addictive.
Schiff also writes about a web site called fundrace.com, where a curious person might go to find out who has given what to which political party. She said she used it to decide who in her building she’d hold the elevator for.
Uh huh, our lives have become an open book for anyone who wants to turn the pages. Problem is, the searchers are probably skipping the boring explanatory material and going straight for the “good parts.”
As Schiff says, “Privacy may be a luxury, but it’s one I’ve sacrificed to order groceries from bed.”
Uh huh, we get something and we lose something.
And if you think you’re above all this, be sure to stay away from Zillow.com.
I dare you.
No comments:
Post a Comment