The Monday Post: Datamancy, or How to find personal information online

I had an interesting experience of the weekend, and got a chance to you some old skills that haven't been touched in years. A good friend of mine, to remain nameless, mused about an old friend they'd lost contact with after high school. Cracking my knuckles I decided to see if I could have any luck in finding that person's whereabouts.

I had developed some odd skills in my early 20's, when the Dotcom boom was swinging into Dotbomb. Some might call it digital stalking, I came up with the nicer term of Datamancy. Before you think I'm ripping someone off in a name, the term itself would break down into "Divination through Information". At the time, my work, in a mail room for a large company, gave me access to a lot of names and addresses. I remember at one point reading about privacy issues online (this was long before Facebook and their shenanigans) and I wondered how much information I could glean using only the name, city, and state information.

I think this may have been the first time I'd found myself shocked by the internet. You need to realize that I don't shock easily: I have an internal filter that allows me to browse 4chan unaffected. /b/ is a creative and funny playground to me, but finding just how much information one could find online got me paranoid. As a result, to this day, it's very fucking hard to find me online. That's because I had a screen name, nigh persona, that I still use. I in fact won't put it here but you might, if you snoop around, find that name.

If, unlike me, you are not a functional paranoid person you will be surprised at how much information you can find about yourself for free. Not that I'm trying to cause paranoia but here's a few things that I used or that helped me over the weekend:

• Names: To name a thing is to control it. To have a full name of someone, including either middle or maiden names, is like walking into a knife fight with a gun. It won't guarantee anything but allows you to weed out "possibly them" when searching.
• High Schools: More and more schools are creating their own alumni sites. While there are a few that might need registration most have open searches. Failing that, classmates.com is of use. In fact, that's about the only use for that site anymore. Here you might need know the age of your *ahem* quarry, which leads to the next item.
• Birth date, or at least approximate age: File this under "The more you know the better" folder. Over the years the Earth will revolve around the sun, the tides will go in and out, and you damn well know someone is going to chose the same name for a child. Even my own name I find many, many others with the same name in google searches. Knowing my age reduces the number down to maybe a few if that much.
• NOTHING IS ABSOLUTE: This is basically my way of saying that everything that I just told you might not work at all. In fact, that's what happened to me over the weekend. I was staring at a black hole, a location/person that nothing escapes from, not even information. 

I thought about listing the websites that help but I don't want anyone to get in trouble for stalking others. That's the downside to Datamancy, it's kind of indistinguishable from outright stalking people. Unless you're a private investigator, which I had contemplated becoming one.