I just scared myself

[andrewducker]

I just added an LJ friend to ICQ. It showed me their real name as part of their profile. Ten seconds with bt.com and google gave me their home address and their website. I felt vaguely worried.

Of course, all of my information is on my userinfo page, but it was a bit of a shock to see how easily I could go from a userinfo page to a website, address, phone number and number of highers.

Update - oh in the interest of scientific enquiry, just found a photo, a sibling and various other bits and pieces.

Of course, thinking more sanely, googling for Andrew Ducker will find you a lot of information on me, and I can't see any way to link back from theirname to their LJ account.

I'm probably worrying over nothing.

Comments

[seidl.livejournal.com]

If you have enough info on a person to ID them uniquely (email addr, name/location, etc) its not hard to do the web sleuth thing. In one of my court cases I ended up having to do that to ID one of the defendants. Took an hour or two of googling and such, but wasn't hard. As well, if you end up really needing it, a lot of libraries have reverse phone number books and other great reference material.

Should you worry? I don't think so. But you also should be aware that its hard to be anonymous. Don't say or do things you won't want to be attached to you.

Re: I just scared myself

[wolfieboy.livejournal.com]

This is why I don't publish my home phone or my home address online. I have a cell phone and a mailbox for such things.

At the same time, I don't say anything that I wouldn't want the entire world to know. It might be embarrassing, difficult, or cause other problems but I lead a very open life. If there is something that -really- can't get out, I don't mention it online or talk about it over a phone...