Stalker-dot-com
I'm pretty much of the perspective that privacy (at least for the digerati) was effectively abolished about five years ago and I'm cool with that. I assume there's nothing I do that won't be published and attributed to me, but while doing a quick Google on a new date (hey, what can I say, I had a computer, a full name and needed an excuse to blow off work for five minutes) I came across a search engine that actually made me a little uncomfortable with the quantity and quality of information provided . . .
The site was pipl.com. I'll admit that the date I tried it on had a fairly unique name, but I got residential address and phone number, previous addresses I knew she'd lived at, her birthdate and even some photos from her facebook profile. I tried it on a couple of other people and was surprised by how good a job it did of pulling together information that in the past would have taken longer to ferret out. Luckily I'm still more or less under the radar with more misses than hits, but if you're having a baby girl, I'm thinking this might be a really good time to name her Jane Smith or something similarly popular . . .
Googling for pipl.com I came across what TechCrunch thought.
What do *you* think?
Recruiters and headhunters are busy leveraging this technology for their industry and clients. Jobs and livelihoods are at stake. It pretty much changes the meaning of a background check. yikes!
;-)
I did what a lot of people will do- searched for myself. I found that according to pipl.com there is no Mike Kear living in Windsor, NSW, Australia (which is where i have lived since 1982 and have had 'Windsor, Australia' in every sig on every forum i've been on since 1993). Also, according to pipl.com, I have 4 facebook profiles (i've never even logged on to facebook) There are photos of me - a female doctor, a dead 18yo soccer player, a photographer of drag queens in some place called Vauxhallville (wherever that is) and according to the photos of "me" it found, i have several teenage girlfriends. This will be shocking news to my wife of 34 years!
I am also apparently a grandfather and Baptist preacher (which will also be something of a revelation to my two sons!)
Even though my real photo has been on my web site for a few years, and i have several other photos of myself on other websites, pipl.com was unable to find any of them.
The only real facts about me it was able to find was a few posts to forums i've been on for more than a decade.
Most disturbing was some posts by one of these mystery Mike Kear's to a Usenet usegroup that deals with incest and pederasty. If potential recruiters are using this service to background my job applications they could well find these posts and cross me off the shortlist as an undesirable.
As i said .... an index can be a very useful thing. But a bad index is worse than no index at all.