Try This At Home

Just for fun, pretend you were someone else. Someone who only knew your name and the city in which you live or work or go to school. Take that information and see how much personal information you can find about you online using google, pipl, whitepages.com, etc. If you can find it, so can Anyone.

I was surprised at what I found about me. And that's without paying $20 for a more in depth report from one site.

Whether you're amused or disturbed about how much and what kind of information can be found online about you, it is still good to know that the net is a very, very public place. And if you delete something, it could live on, cached, in the databases of Google or someone else for a very long time. This came to me after reading (another) article about how young kids should be warned about putting personal info online and blah blah blah, but it reminded me of some article I read a while back where the journalist doing the article interviewed some internet search guru who took 20 minutes and pulled up all kinds of info about the journalist, which surprised him/her. Don't remember what article it was though, it was a while back.

FYI

By the way, we're up to 1248 posts (including saved drafts) on this blog. Aren't you all proud of us?