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The internet offers various ways to conduct people research, including online white pages, search engines, and specialized services. Paid services provide more detailed information, but privacy implications exist. Companies use the information to target their products, making legislative action necessary to address the issue.
The Internet offers a surprising variety of ways to conduct people research. With a little diligence, it’s usually not difficult to find information about friends, ancestors, colleagues, classmates, and family members. The first step for a person searching is to determine the type of information they are looking for. Someone who is primarily interested in obtaining contact information will likely find the search relatively easy; he or she simply needs to visit an online white pages directory.
To use online white pages, a person would need to enter all the information they have available. Your first and last name will probably be needed, along with a state or city. People who don’t get the desired results on the first try can try making the query a little more generic, omitting the city or name. By doing so, he is broadening the scope of the search, but a side effect is that he is likely to receive many more results that will take longer to sift through. Also, if the subject the person is looking for has a common name, they may receive a significant number of hits.
Online white pages usually provide phone and address information; some may also include an email address if available. Databases are rarely deleted, so the information may be outdated or there may be multiple entries for a particular person. In some cases, there is enough information to trace a person’s journey from one residence to another. There are many white pages online and people can find the most suitable one by using their favorite search engine.
Those looking for information that the White Pages don’t provide can search elsewhere. Surprisingly, regular search engines sometimes reveal very interesting information about individuals. While the searcher may not find the address or phone number she is looking for, the person can often find out the subject’s place of work, club affiliations or hobe interests. Plenty of names appear on race results pages, conference attendance lists, or community meeting minutes/agenda. This information can help the searcher create further search queries to discover even more information.
People can also take their research to the many specialized services that can assist them in their research. Someone who is conducting research to learn about their ancestry will find that there are all sorts of sites that specifically target genealogical information. With these genealogy services, a person typically specifies a last name and locality and searches through the records to uncover the data.
There are other services that cater to special types of relationships, such as databases that specialize in listing alumni information. The researcher simply navigates to his graduating year and finds his school, and can get contact information about his former classmates. These services are especially valuable because browsing ex-friend lists reminds a person of people they have forgotten to know. Classmate lists can also help solve the maiden name problem; suppose, for example, that the researcher knows the maiden name of an old friend, but she did not know her first name after she got married.
Other specialized search services include those that focus on lawyers, doctors, college alumni, and real estate agents. If a researcher knows that someone has attended a particular university, he might try searching through alumni lists. Alternatively, if she knew that an old friend was planning to become a doctor, the person could search a directory of doctors to try and trace the individual. However, some of these databases are only available to particular groups of people and may not be available to the general public.
If these sources don’t help a person complete their personal research, there are paid services that provide much more information. Paid services collect information from a wide variety of sources that aren’t readily available, such as court records, real estate records, and magazine subscription information. By linking all of this information together, they can build detailed profiles of almost anyone. These services usually charge a flat fee and provide surprisingly detailed reports.
The privacy implications of all this publicly available information are worth mentioning. Not so long ago, people could live anonymously and their personal information was their own. In the age of the Internet and large databases, disparate information can be combined to expose a large amount of data about a particular person. People who don’t want their private information to be publicly available need to be extremely diligent and disciplined. In some cases, people may request to have their information removed from certain databases.
The trend of gathering more and more information about people is mainly fueled by companies using the information to help them target their wares. For a company that is looking to sell legal sanitary pads, for example, sending advertisements to the general public would be prohibitively expensive. If the marketing campaign could only target lawyers, advertising conversions would likely increase. For this reason, this trend is unlikely to abate in the absence of substantial legislative action.
