Manage your reputation or else

Wow, so we're all aware that there's a lot of info about us out there on the Internet - but just how much and how personal is that info? I mean sure, some stalker-hacker-maniac could probably find a picture of you on google-earth if they looked long enough or hack google-latitude and find where you are. Sure, that's a little creepy. However, I had not seen an in depth EASY to use resource that searched across so many mediums to compile a virtual dossier until I found pipl.com today.

I've been interested in managing my reputation online for a while, granted done little with it. Recently I've become concerned with managing my wife's google results, which is what prompted today's discovery of pipl when I googled myself and looked down towards page 6 in the results. This thing pulls it all together in one place and even tries to guess potential user names for someone - they may be fishing for a lawsuit with that sort of functionality. Nonetheless, I found a lot of info about myself there, compiled from a lot of different places - some accurate, some not. I checked out a couple other people, those with less unique names are less identifiable, but if your name is unique it's another story. I was surprised to discover that my wife's recommended favorites and recently browsed items from her Amazon.com account were available when I searched for her. Honestly I felt a bit uncomfortable even just searching for other people as some information that could be available - I don't want to know! Do we want to know when our friends and coworkers are searching for books on dealing with marriage difficulties, or finding a new job, etc. etc.? I don't! I suspect in another few days I'll be over the initial shock of the amount of info available and accept it as the norm - perhaps akin to perceptions of modesty over time, so too will perceptions of privacy change. Still though, are we crossing a line here that isn't healthy?

When I saw my wife's recent Amazon searches online it surprised me - that's not something I expected to be publicly available. Thankfully, it appears she has been searching for mundane stuff - medical texts and Malcolm Gladwell books... There's an old cliche for American Patriotism - Freedom isn't Free. The intended application of this refers to the sacrifice made by soldiers and others to provide the freedoms we have today. Loss of privacy ultimately reduces freedom. Most of our personal data out there on the web for perusal is coming from "free" websites - perhaps the cliche applies to the Internet as well - freedom (read privacy) isn't free.

Pipl is not the only player here by any means, there were at least a dozen others I came across in my brief foray, many free, some for pay. It's been nearly 10 years since I first came across the birthday listing online that has millions of U.S. citizens search able by name with their birth dates. That was a shock back then, but still - how private is a birthday really? Many post the full thing on their facebook profile. Some of the other information now out there, search able with a few key strokes, is much more personal to me than a birth date.

The bottom line - the concept of privacy existing online has always been a falsehood, over the next 5 years I expect most people will finally come to realize this. What then? Start actively managing your online identity, the sooner the better. If you don't do it, something else will, and you may not want your first result for a prospective employer to be your most recently browsed Amazon.com titles...

....in the meantime, if anyone ever wonders how our marriage is or if we have any rare diseases, be sure and checkout pipl.com for more recent info on our formerly-private lives.