advertisement:
Today, for most people, it’s hard to imagine what life was like before the Internet and e-mail.
I’ve only been using both for about nine years, but rarely a day passes that I don’t surf the Net for a little while or check e-mail. Of all the inventions in my short lifetime, the Internet has probably had the biggest impact.
Even though I’ve been using it on a regular basis for almost a decade, I still find myself learning more about it every day. With that knowledge comes more amazement and sometimes a little fear.
Two weeks ago, I, along with publisher Mark Miller and reporter Frank Shanly, went to a newspaper conference/awards ceremony in Indianapolis. One of the sessions we attended was on how to get online to find out nearly anything about anybody fast and free. Seemed like an interesting class since journalists are in the business of covering people.
The description of the session read, “This session will take you to places on the Internet where you can find out whatever you need to know about the people you cover.”
After a 70-minute interactive workshop, I left flabbergasted. The speaker, from the Poynter Institute in Florida, took us to a plethora of different Web sites and showed us just how easy it is to find out anything about anybody. It was amazing ... but scary at the same time since so much is now online. (Even more mind boggling was when he showed us how to find a Web site that has been offline or how to find what a Web site looked like on a certain date, going back to 1996!) Seems as if very little is 100 percent private anymore.
Toward the end of the session, for example, he asked for a volunteer. A woman raised her hand, and within five minutes, we knew where she lived, where she had lived throughout her life, names of her family members and more.
Curiosity got the best of me, so I came home that night and tried some of the techniques from the session.
My first search took me to www.zoominfo.com/Default.aspx?, a site that is supposed to let you find background information about millions of people free.
Three seconds after typing in my name, three results emerged. Two of the three labeled Justin Peeper as a reporter and contributor to The News-Banner. Not bad, I thought, but the site failed to mention my school ties.
The third hit, however, said Justin Peeper is the director of Wells County EMS. Last time I checked, Tina Dudgeon was still in that position and doing a fine job ... much better than I could. At least the site noted, “This information has not been verified.”
I wonder how this site determined I was director of Wells County EMS? I once was certified in CPR and First Aid, but that’s about the extent of my medical background. I did a little digging on the site and finally determined why it labeled me as an EMS director.
About two years ago, I wrote a story about Wells County’s new 800MHz radio system. In the story, I interviewed Tina Dudgeon and identified her as Wells County’s EMS director. Seems the site pulled my name from the story byline and Tina’s title from the second paragraph and joined the two.
I searched for some friends, family members and Bluffton community leaders and found information on almost all of them, with the exception of my parents.
The speaker also told us about a Web site (http://yoname.com) that searches social networks such as MySpace, Facebook, etc.
Surprisingly, I found information on a few friends from college who I haven’t spoken with in quite a while ... and saw that one of them even had a picture posted that I had taken several years ago!
Frank Shanly made an interesting observation as we were leaving, however, when he noted while this type of research is easy in the United States, it is much more difficult if not impossible in New Zealand, his birth place.
I could write several more inches on how amazed I was during the session and afterward upon learning just how easy it is to find information about virtually anyone online. And it seems once something is posted online, there’s a good chance it’s there for good.
Amazing ... or scary?
We’ll let you be the judge.
In the meantime, if you’d like to search for information on some old high school buddies, try one of these sites we learned about in our session. But, as we were reminded with the EMS director title, always consider the source!
www.argali.com (PC only)
www.spock.com
http://wink.com
http://pipl.com/
www.sputtr.com
by JUSTIN PEEPER
Read this story in our E-Edition, Click Here
Talk about this story in our forums!