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FINDING
YOU FINDING ME Surely the telephone book should be made redundant. It consumes huge quantities of paper, ink, time, energy and your money (you pay for it via telecom phone charges). More and more people (if they are anything like me) are unlisted anyway, so its only businesses who really want to be in the book. In a word, its advertising .. do you want to advertise your phone number and address? So there's two issues. Why pay for advertising and why pay to compromise your privacy. In the bigger picture, advertising by paper is a real burden weighing down the environment - and it needs to be reduced. OK, PlaNet does produce a magazine, and eventually that will have to evolve into something people want (voluntarily pay for) and keep (as a journal rather than a newspaper). And OK again, people do want to find each other for very laudable reasons .. but is the white pages of the phone book the way? I contend it isn't. First get rid of the white pages and have free phone requests to be replaced ever more rapidly by Internet search engines (see below). Privacy? Thats the balancing side of the dialectic, being left alone. This is the biggest question in modern life after health - being able to chose who to relate/communicate with and who can communicate/interfere with you. I don't have any magic bullets, just an attitude recommendation, be as careful with your personal information as you are with your money. As
for the other side, finding out about others, the Internet is superbly place to
locate a lost love, displaced relative, respected teacher. If you need to dig
deeper, there is any number of (and shades of) EPI's who will take your money
and attempt to probe for you. Probably a good idea to try it, sleep with the enemy
and you'll never be caught with your pants down again. You are clicks away from gathering background information from public records on prospective employees, business competitors or ... whatever. I do want to sound paranoid, there's good reason to be careful about who you let into your office or your life or even who you give your address to. The sites below will take you from basic people finding for free to more in-depth sleuthing for a fee. First, use your favourite search e AnyWho: This AT&T site lets you search for people or businesses, for free. The advanced search option has a ³begins with² feature you can select when you¹re not quite sure of a name, address or city and a ³sounds like² feature for last names. Try This. PeopleSearch: Search a raft of search engines at once, either by the person¹s name or by address, phone number or email address -- and all for free. There¹s also an international search option. Try This 1800 US Search: Offers a wide range of self-conducted and specialist-conducted searches for and about people, all for a fee. Self-conducted electronic searches of things like bankruptcy filings and death records run $10 to $20 -- or you can order a specialist-conducted package like ³Do You Know Who You are Dating?² for a little more money. Discreet Records: This for-pay site will find people for you or find out about people for you, with searches starting at $19. The searches all involve public records, but there are lots of references to things like ³valid date of birth,² ³aliases² and ³Social Security number fraud.² Get to know them before they get to know you.
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