Digital Tattoos

Data mining is the politically correct word for creeping. My partner and I spent about 40 minutes looking for information on one G.W. from Silicon Valley. While we did not finding anything salacious, I feel better about keeping my Facebook profile restricted to “only friends.”  Our search did unearth interesting information, however it is all publicly available: teacher salaries, real estate records, land line numbers. It would be very very difficult for someone to remove all of this information from the web. This is also information that was always public record pre-internet, you just had to look for it at the various public offices or the White Pages. But in the immortal words of Kimberly Borwn, “ain’t nobody got time for that!”

Even if you decide to fork over cash to a site like Spokeo or Instant Checkmate they are still only mining public records. You would get much better results if you were able to search with a social security number, but none of them give you the option.

TIP: If you decide to pay one of these sites for their public records before you buy hit the back button on your browser. You will be offered a much lower trial rate.

What the internet has done is made it easier to find the information. Now you have no excuse not to check out your neighbor or love interest. 

Comic by Jelly Vampire

Unfortunately all of this information can lead us down a slippery slope. Imagine you are going to go out with someone for the first time. You decide to “Google” them first. You find out everything you need to know about them. Then you spend the great getting to know you part of the relationship pretending to be surprised and interested by everything they tell you, even though you know how they spend their vacations and that they have 35 cousins that they hang out with. I want to encourage you to take it easy on the Googling and let things unfold in the real world.

That being said, you would be silly not to check someone out, say prior to making a big commitment. I would kick myself in the behind if I had all of this information available and did not access it only to find skeletons in the closet.