Look Who’s Googling

On a recent flight to Italy, a friend of mine met a guy, hooked up, and assumed that was the end of it. She was, after all, on her way to visit her boyfriend. Unfortunately for her, she failed to take the wondrous powers of Google into account.

“I only told him my first name and a very general account of what I did for a living,” said *Alison Charles, 26, who, until recently, has been dealing with her “cyberstalker” ever since that fateful flight last summer.

Google your full name and variations of it and make sure you are not showing up anywhere. Check the online phonebooks, type in your address and phone numbers. Sometimes you’ll be surprised on what you’ll find.

All a person needs is your first name and last name and they have you. Because if someone wants more information all they have to do is pay about $10 bucks and on a sight like this: Intellius or People Finders and they can get even more info such as your home address. Many times paying a third party company is not even necessary, they can just google you.

These days even more data can be extracted using the local county. I won’t go in how to do this because most people don’t know about it and I’d like to keep it that way. For some reason Federal and Local governments have a complete disregard for the privacy of citizens.

The point is that you should never put your personal information online. Use identification proxies such as: a psuedo name, a P.O. Box, an 800 number to keep intouch with your audience if your a blogger. You may trust some of the people you interact with online, but for every 10 people that are decent there is at least one who will want more information than you are willing to give.

I’ve heard stories of stalkers showing at homes of unsuspecting Internet users, targeted “spear phishing” attacks, and worse. Protect your data.

Military PII (personally identifiable data):
The military has resently gotten very serious about protecting PII. PII includes the following data:

Full name (if not common)
National identification number
Telephone number
Street address
E-mail address
IP address (in some cases)
Vehicle registration plate number
Driver’s license number
Face, fingerprints, or handwriting
Credit card numbers
Digital identity

When these bits of data are combined they can be used to gather more and more.

More on PII at CDT.org