Online safety.

Search engines have made information readily available all over the world, and in nearly every topic.

This includes privacy. You may not realize this, but it is very easy to find people online.

I have read that all you need is three identifiers to find a person.

identifiers are things like...

first name
last name
birthday
phone number
ssn

Those are obvious, right?

What about these?

Hobbies
Professions
Photographs
City or Location
Age
Schools Attended

Some people are good at this kind of thing (me) and some are not. So here is how it works...

Let's say I have first and last name, with location.

Easy peasey... try it on yourself, you might be surprised. If you have first and last name both use it like this "John Smith" in your search, then add the name of the place.

The key here is name. If you don't have an actual name, then it is harder. Then you need to do some real digging....like school records, if you know where they went to school. Or work. Or clubs.

What if you volunteered someplace...often your name gets posted someplace as a thank you.

Facebook is the devil when it comes to privacy, as are other social media outlets...even pintrest or instagram.

I won't say how as it is a bit beyond the average person, but you can even search an image in google to find every place it has been used.

So your profile photo, you got from last years picinic and also posted it on instragram and facebook.. bam, all done.

email? usually email has your name, and ip address it was sent from. Geo-ip can identify the location of the internet service provider. pow, location. or name.

Some forums used to show ip addresses, some things like wiki's still show them when editing.

This assumes that the person has no access to anything "official."

I assume that people could find me if they wanted to bad enough. You should as well, and if you are ever credibly threatened online you should report it ASAP.

Not sure if people realize this kind of thing or not, but let me assure you it is very real. If you pay a couple bucks online you can get criminal records, property records, birth records(maybe), marriage records.

As language processing ability increases the access to this information is easier and easier.

Be careful out there folks.