Just wanted to share a quick story with you. I know we've discussed this before but I can't find the thread.
This is about how easy it is to find someone online, and how easy it is for us to accidentally give details of our lives. For 3.5 years I had a part time job in an office. I was only there once a week for a few hours, so I never spent much time talking to the people who worked in the back, except for a couple that would come up to talk to the boss. Not that we didn't interact at all, but I never took lunches with them or really had any chance to chat. I'd come in, work and leave for another job. I was also usually the second person there so unless I had a question I had no reason to go back and talk to anyone.
The other night I met up with one of them. I had given them my business card, which has my full name on it (not a common name) and city, along with my cell. In turn, I had their email, cell and their physical address, plus I knew their full name with middle initial from work.
I was there a little over an hour and we were just chatting about silly things. But when I got home, I was able to find this person on FB in less than 15 mins simply because they handed me two little pieces of info that I didn't have before - that a sibling lived in another state and where they grew up. I had already searched on siblings and parents out of curiosity and had come up blank - mom was using a maiden name and one sibling had their info locked down. But having this other state PLUS the hometown zeroed me in. They have a common last name, and my friends first name is very common with quite a few variants. I had only tried the full name and the nickname I had heard at work. When the sibling set up the account for them though, it was set up with a nickname that I had never heard used for them (but was probably a childhood nickname) and middle name only. As soon as I found the sibling, I had my friend in seconds, searching the siblings friend list by first name.
So then I wondered how easy it would be for them to find me. I've had a coworker do a similar thing to me because they went to school with my sister and my sister had her family connections open to the public at that time (I also don't use my full name on fb). So I reverse engineered my own name and because it's uncommon enough that not many come up, I was easily able to find 3 people with open friend lists where people could find me, as long as they weren't fixated on my first/last name only. Then I wondered what info I had given my friend in conversation, and remembered I had laughed about my SIL having the same name as me, and what my brother did for a living. My brother doesn't have his work posted on FB but if he did, again it would be an easy way to me.
My point is that I wasn't trying to grill my friend for this info, we were just talking about every day stuff and of course family/friends/work/living arrangements all came up. So imagine a psychic who has our phone number because we've called them, can reverse search our area code - not bullet proof these days with cell phones, asks a quick question about a family member, etc. They do this all day every day and I'm sure they are much better at it then we can ever be.
There's a lot of info out there on us, like it or not. I discovered one of my bosses is putting our full names in a blog she writes when she wants to thank us specifically, so now a pic of her and her husband show up when I search for images with my name - creepy! I also found I had written a review for a product through work and while I didn't sign it, I must've been logged in as now those product images show up with my full name and I need to get them to remove that!
And the really funny thing was that another girl that worked the days I didn't, used to stalk the other workers on fb, but had never found my account or the person I saw the other night, because she never went beyond the traditional first/last name combo.
Food for thought.......
