The USA has to do something with existing Privacy Laws.
You Can Search, but Can You Hide?
Using the Net, Old Friends, Old Flames and Old Debts Might Find You
search.nytimes.com
By
TINA KELLEY
Jennifer Rahel Conover of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., found "the most priceless gift" for her husband, Ted, recently, just by surfing the Web, she said. For several years, she had worked through alumni associations, the Department of Veterans Affairs and regional newspapers to try to find David Granger, a college friend of Conover and a fellow World War II veteran.
"I was almost afraid that this Dave Granger, whom I'd never met, might have died," she said. "Otherwise I was sure someone could have helped me find him."
Then she typed his name into phone directories she found on the Alta Vista and Metacrawler search engine sites and found Granger's phone number and address in Mesa, Ariz. The old friends hope to meet face to face next year. Granger, who lost touch with Conover several years after they graduated from the University of Miami, said he felt a sense of "awe that they could find me."
The Internet is full of stories of people who once were lost but now are found: high-school sweethearts reuniting, college roommates catching up on old times, people who need transplants finding lost blood relatives. With "people finders," the search engines that serve as giant phone books, it's easier than ever to find and be found, and that's good news. Mostly.
But what if you don't want to be found? What if a friend you served with in the Pacific was the house guest who wouldn't leave? Or your old boyfriend with a drinking problem still thinks you are the hero of his own country-and-western song? Do people finders interfere with the desire for life, liberty and the pursuit of anonymity?
The news is mixed. Most people finders are no better than telephone books. Sometimes you can't even find yourself or people you know. But some can be eerily productive -- and potentially damaging.
People finders come in a variety of shapes and sizes; many of them are found on search engine sites and other Web portals.
Besides phone numbers, some provide fax numbers and e-mail and home-page addresses, and some may eventually offer pager and cellular phone numbers.
People finders are popular.
In September, Switchboard logged 6.8 million visitors, Infospace 3.5
million, and Anywho 1.5 million.
These electronic directories can be easier to use than directory assistance or the white pages of a phone book, as their databases do not require surfers to know the full name of the person they are seeking. For example, Anywho lets you type in partial names that begin with or end with certain letters or syllables -- or that rhyme with certain syllables. Wild-card letters are allowed at Whowhere on Lycos; for example, you can type in Franc*s if you cannot remember how Francis or Frances spells his or her name. That site also provides searches for e-mail addresses, government officials and people in foreign countries.
Some people finders offer lots of bells and whistles.
Searchers with Java-enabled browsers can type a surname into Whowhere.com and see, on a rotating globe, the location of all the Carmen Sandiegos in the world. Anywho can connect you directly by phone to a person you found in a search (if you use a dial-up Internet connection, you'll need a second phone line for the call).
But for some people who value their privacy, these services may make it difficult to get and stay lost. Many sites provide Web surfers with a map to your house and listings of nearby neighbors, hotels, restaurants and even post offices. (Yahoo's People Search actually puts a big red star on the map in front of your house.) That degree of detail is a little alarming if there are cyberstalkers who want to know where you live. Conceivably, a stalker could get a person's name with a search based on an e-mail address, then find where the person lives.
Switchboard.com, which also includes e-mail addresses in its search results, was the last of the people finders to include neighborhood maps, said David Gersh, director for business development at the company, in Westborough, Mass. "It was a Catch-22 for us, it honestly was," he said. "We were concerned about privacy. Talking to users, we found people were split about wanting maps associated with their own house, but they definitely wanted maps of other people's houses. It was a competitive disadvantage to us not to provide maps." The company decided to show a person's street but not the exact location of the person's house.
To test the effectiveness -- and the potential intrusiveness -- of people finders, Christopher Dillingham, an adjunct professor of communications at the University of Central Florida, tried to find personal information online about his former colleagues at the Deland, Fla., police department. He described the search in an article on the Internet.
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Even with an unlisted phone, you may find it hard to stay out of databases.
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"Most, if not all, state laws make it a crime to maliciously publish an officer's address," Dillingham said. "Most states also have confidentiality clauses that allow officers exceptions from public record requirements."
But Dillingham was able to find everyone he searched for, including five former supervisors, and their addresses, maps to their homes and, in some cases, their phone numbers through simple searches on American Directory Assistance.
Generally, a lot of personal information about someone can be made public online legally -- what's legal can vary from state to state. If a phone number is unlisted, Dillingham said, there are still many other places, like utility-company and delivery-service databases, that may make it available.
The majority of data searched by the people finders comes from phone books that a handful of companies collect and either scan or retype into one huge database. Info USA, based in Omaha, has 350 workers who type in, verify and update information. It says its database includes 11 million businesses, and it is compiling a directory of 110 million households. (According to updated United States census figures from August 1997, the total number of households in the country is 109.8 million, and many of them have unlisted phone numbers or no phone service at all, though others have multiple lines.) The company calls all the businesses in its yellow pages at least once a year to verify information.
The only way an unlisted phone number can get into Internet people finders,said Lauren Bigelow, director of content development for Alta Vista, is if it was published in an old directory before it was unlisted and if that old directory is used as part of the database. People with unlisted phone numbers can create an electronic listing for themselves on different people finders that simply lists their e-mail addresses or business affiliations.
But people who want to protect their privacy must still search out all the people-finder databases they are listed in and ask to be removed, said Susan Scott of Truste.org, a group that promotes privacy rights online and offers a seal of approval for Web sites that protect users' privacy.
Dillingham said people concerned with privacy should use alternate
addresses, like post office boxes, when filling out any document that is a public record, like a driver's license application. They should also tell businesses that they do not want their personal information distributed or sold, he said. Someone who really does not want to be found can get a phone number under another name, he said.
While people can remove their listings from most people-finder directory pages, public records, like bankruptcy filings, are increasingly becoming available online and can be used -- often for a price -- to track down those who may leave few other traces. Such public documents record marriages, convictions, real estate purchases, bankruptcies and deaths.
"More and more courts are putting their records online so you can go and pull up a claim for free," said Chris Sherman, a Web search guide at the Mining Company (www.miningco.com), the human-powered search engine site, adding that such records can be very easy or very difficult to see, depending upon the jurisdiction. He said knowx.com appeared to be the easiest site to use for records searches, and added that such searches could also be done at subscription databases like Lexis-Nexis (www.lexisnexis.com) and West Publishing (www.westpub.com). One site, 1-800-U.S. Search(1800ussearch.com), does background checks for $139.
Safeguards are in place to help keep pranksters from changing other people's listings. At Switchboard and Lycos, you can change your listing via e-mail once you have a password. Anywho, which powers people finders at the Excite, Webcrawler and Infoseek portals, requires you to place a call from the number in question to change your directory listing. Switchboard, Alta Vista and Lycos offer the electronic equivalent of Caller ID, a service called either Knock Knock or Who's There, which allows searchers to send queries to
people who do not list their e-mail publicly. The site acts as the
intermediary, relaying a message to the person found, who can either refuse the query or respond to it.
People concerned about their privacy should also be careful about making public postings online that could come back to haunt them, Ms. Scott warned.
"You have to be very careful now where you decide to post your personal information in a public forum," she said, pointing out that bulletin boards and chat lines could be searched, even by potential employers.
"If you were part of a chat room when you were in college, and 10 years later -- who hasn't changed in that amount of time? -- let's say you're going to apply for a job," she said. "It may or may not be you, it may be somebody with the same name, or it may be something you totally regretted in your life, and you're not the same person now."
Looking to the future, Sean White, chief technology officer at Lycos,
predicted that directories would focus less on information and more on
people. "If I wanted to contact you and you have five e-mail addresses," he said, "you would be able to say, 'Here's the primary one I want this mail going to,' or you could say on a particular day, 'I'm on vacation, and here's how I want it to be handled.' " The people finder would route your e-mail for you.
Sherman, of the Mining Company, said there was no good one-stop way to find people online. "A lot of times, the easiest thing to do is call the reference library in whatever city you think the person might be living in," he said. He is looking forward to the centralization of the portals, he said, when the search scene will become more unified. He expects to see more consolidation of databases.
"Yahoo bought Four11.com, and Lycos bought Whowhere," he said. "Hopefully, they'll all have an agreement, and form one standard or directory."
In Florida, the Conovers are looking forward to meeting Granger. "Ted has talked about him for years, and I have done my best to locate him for the last five or six years," Ms. Conover said. "I'd almost given up."
People Finders & Related Sites:
*Switchboard, switchboard.com
Database: 120 million listings. Uses Info USA. Includes: E-mail addresses and a knock-knock button, which is used to find out whether listed people want to receive mail from searchers. Alta Vista also uses Switchboard.
*Infospace infospace.com
Database: 100 million in United States, 200 million in Europe; 16 million American yellow-page listings. Includes reverse directory, fax numbers, E-mail, partial name searches, European listings. Metacrawler, 555-1212, MSN, Netscape and America Online use Infospace.
*Lycos lycos.com
Database: more than 90 million phone listings in the United States. Uses Whowhere. Includes E-mail addresses, allows searches by partial spelling. Used by MCI, US West Dex, Ziff-Davis and Mindspring.
*Anywho anywho.com
More than 90 million consumer listings in the United States. Includes
reverse directory, direct phone connections, partial name searching, Web addresses, fax and toll-free numbers. Used by Excite, Webcrawler and Infoseek.
*KnowX knowx.com
Some searches are free, but costs range up to $65.
*Locate Me locateme.com
Can search more than 120 million records. Cost: $20 to $30.
*1-800-U.S. Search 1800ussearch.com
Searches for people and does background checks. Cost: $79.95 for finding people.
*People Finder people-finder.com
Access to two billion public records. If you get a match, a name search is $39.95.
*Alta Vista altavista.com
*Lexis-Nexis lexisnexis.com
*West Publishing westpub.com
*Four11.com people.yahoo.com
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
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To those who said they were not worried about their on-line privacy, do you still have that opinion?
Have you ever been Divorced? Do you have a weight problem? Have you declared bankruptcy? Have you had a criminal record-maybe didn't pay those tickets? This can all be found on-line.
Don't you think the USA should tighten Privacy Laws like they have done in Europe? Why doesn't SI Admin (Bob) use his real name? |
