Have You Checked Your Online Profile Lately?

Everyone has an online profile, even if they are never online. Websites like pipl.com and 123people.com are aggregators of information. These free resources pull together publicly available information about individuals from many sources and produce an attractive, well organized page. Some types of information these websites find are below:

Current and prior addresses

Phone numbers

Family members

Age

Map or directions to one’s home

Current and prior employers

Photos.

If you are active online, these sites can also pull together places where you have been mentioned and your recent posts to blogs and social networking sights. For a small fee, these websites will link to criminal background checks and marriage/divorce records.

These websites get their information from a small number of databases. If you find wrong information about yourself and you would like to correct it, it is a very tedious process, but it can be done. You cannot entirely remove yourself from these databases without a court order because most of the information is publicly available on everyone.

The more you contribute online the more information these sites can find. If you want to check your online profile, just doing a Google search is not enough. Take it a step further and check at least one of these other websites.