Show Yourself!
In today's day and age, it is very easy to be an e-stalker. Just type the name of someone you know into Google and stalk away. Nobody will be any the wiser, and you can fulfill your own sick need to find out how many 5ks your ex has run over the past few years or whether your next door neighbor is a pedophile. But it's the people that aren't part of the Google encyclopedia that make me the most curious.
How have they managed to stay off of the web? Now that everything is documented in an online version, the chances of slipping through the cracks are getting smaller and smaller. Is it a deliberate choice or just plain luck? I mean, many companies have employee lists available. There are alumni rosters from high schools and colleges. My Space pages, magazine articles... it's all right there, in front of us, virtually. How has the web not managed to entangle those few sneaky peers of ours?
A sucker for a good story, I can only imagine that they are part of the witness protection program, or have changed their name to profit from a huge identity theft ring. It's just better than thinking that they have done nothing of interest over the past years since I knew them last that would be worthy of documentation on the world wide web.
How have they managed to stay off of the web? Now that everything is documented in an online version, the chances of slipping through the cracks are getting smaller and smaller. Is it a deliberate choice or just plain luck? I mean, many companies have employee lists available. There are alumni rosters from high schools and colleges. My Space pages, magazine articles... it's all right there, in front of us, virtually. How has the web not managed to entangle those few sneaky peers of ours?
A sucker for a good story, I can only imagine that they are part of the witness protection program, or have changed their name to profit from a huge identity theft ring. It's just better than thinking that they have done nothing of interest over the past years since I knew them last that would be worthy of documentation on the world wide web.
posted by Tracy at 8:26 AM
2 Comments:
I think one reason it's hard to find some people is that most women change their names when they get married. If you're looking for an old girlfriend or just an old friend from school and they've gotten married before the web started to really catch on (say before 10 years ago) their maiden name may be nowhere to be found.
That's one reason it's sometimes difficult to track down female high school and college graduates for reunions using Google.
Oddly enough, I am one of those people you won't find in Google results. I tried searching for my name and I got results about someone who plays Dungeons and Dragons, another one is a professional diver (not the SCUBA kind), and a college hockey player.
Mixed in with those results you'll find one link on Classmates.com from someone asking if they know where I am.
How did I manage to stay anonymous? Because I'm actually a hitman whose identity was changed years ago during a mission where my hands and face were seriously damaged in wooden barrel factory explosion. After countless surgeries, my fingerprints were different and I now look like David Hasslehoff.
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