Keeping you Good Name in a Time of Websites that find Information about People

We may not intentionally place personal details about ourselves on the Internet for strangers to find; but place them there, we do - descriptive accounts of our dates, anecdotes about our job interviews, our opinions about movies and vacation spots, our troubles with our spouses - we put them all on Facebook and ask all our "friends" what they think; and we invite them to share their lives with us in similar fashion. There are all kinds of people out there whose job it is to find information about people - businesses that wish to employ people, marketers who wish to do a bit of research on the cheap, potential romantic partners, potential stalkers - social networking and everything else we do to to share our lives on the Internet present a rich field of information to anyone with an agenda. What are you supposed to do?

To begin with, how do you find out what information about you is available online? When someone out there tries find information about people like you, what is the aggregate of all that they can see about you on the Internet? That's where a website like Spokeo comes in. Key in your name, and and right away, the search engine calls up all the estimates it can find of where you live, who you are, all the pictures it can possibly find about you, your address and everything else. You can get all of this for free at many of these websites; sometimes, you are asked for a donation. Some of these search functions even make it possible for you to find out information about a person's political affiliations, their vacation preferences and everything else. It goes through all the Facebook comments that public or blog posts to do with you. Companies can easily use this kind of information to deny person a job, insurance coverage or a loan.

A lot of what people find in wiki eaks is usually embarrassing stuff that one world leader has had the misfortune of being on record saying about another. Come to think of it, that's the kind of information that these people-finder services dredge for. And they can be very successful. One of the first places you go to to clear up your good name would be all the online dating sites that you no longer use that have a great deal of personal information that you at one time must have volunteered. Some of these places can have outdated policies on privacy and can easily have leaked stuff about you.

To reclaim your life, should probably start out by deleting all revealing information about you on Facebook. Make sure your privacy settings make your details available only to your closest friends and make sure that you deactivate any unused accounts at any social networking site that you are a member of. If there's stuff about you on someone else's website or social networking account, you have no choice but to ask them. Sometimes, you have to speak to the people-finding websites to have your details removed.

To find information about people on the Internet isn't any big deal anymore. Perhaps prevention is the only good way to deal with this problem. Make sure that you aren't ever careless about what you type in on your computer keyboard.