Anyone can play detective...

A friend of mine told me about this website www.spokeo.com. It basically markets itself as a kind of online phonebook so if you type in your name or email address it basically searches throught the internet to pull up any data it can find about you. Now it's an american site so typing in your name probably won't do any good, but your email address is worth a shot. When he typed his email address it pulled up some of his facebook photos (his privacy settings shouldn't allow anyone to see his photos though even on facebook). So I typed in my email address but it found nothing on me. Baptiste though typed in looking for info on a friend of his in america and it pulled up family members, phone number etc. the kind of stuff that shouldnt really be made public. Once the site pulls up information about you it then says that you can pay to find out more! Its crazy that search engines like this exist, where their sole purpose is finding out information about you. Obviously it started with great honest intentions but it can lead to your personal details ending up in the wrong hands. The main fear I have with sites like this is that this is just one we only discovered recently, how many more similar sites are online which give anybody the ability to easily determine someones personal information, without having to 'friend' them on social networking sites. Our lives are becomming more and more public and without our knowledge, scary stuff.