Online People Searches Can Make You Vulnerable

The growing popularity of online people searches gives you many opportunities: You can find old friends and classmates, locate long-forgotten romantic interests or get information about missing relatives. You can also find ways to contact business associates and check up on potential dates with these services, and it's all anonymous and inexpensive.

While incredibly valuable, these people search engines come with important internet privacy risks. They offer opportunities to criminals, such as identity thieves, hackers, stalkers and burglars. These services also provide legal but ethically questionable opportunities for people such as snooping spouses, private investigators and debt collectors. Any time you give information about yourself online, you're putting yourself at risk. That's in addition to the danger you're already in by way of the public records that anyone can find with these services. These can include birth and death records, marriage license filings, civil and bankruptcy documents and any evidence of criminal history. Unfortunately, you can't hide most of these records from prying eyes.

The most important hazard that comes with online people searches is the chance that your identity will be stolen. Almost all of these services let anyone find information on people such as their full names, possible relatives, phone numbers and email addresses. It costs just a few dollars. For more money, they can find all public records related to you, including partial social security numbers. If an enterprising thief used more than one of these services, it would take just minutes to get all the necessary sensitive information to steal your good name, your reputation and your money.

Another threat comes by way of stalkers and snooping partners, detectives or business contacts. Finding addresses and places of employment is easy with these services, and it's similarly simple to find social networking information and photos. You could be at risk of physical harm, at worst. At best, your privacy could be compromised and you might have to move and change all your online passwords.

Prevention
There are ways to manage your internet privacy, but it can take time, money and constant vigilance. Your first steps should be preventive. Start with making your social networking profiles and email addresses private, and then don't give your usernames to anyone. Next, be sure that your phone number is not listed, and only give it out to friends and trusted colleagues.

Hiding Your Sensitive Personal Information
Next, you'll probably need to have some information about you removed from these people search engines and other information suppositories. The majority of people search and background checks have opt-out policies that let you prevent your information from being used in their search results. Using some of these is very difficult. You have to fax or mail a copy of your driver's license regarding each record, and you can't hide any public records about you. Other services let you opt-out of the results with just a few clicks, and they will hide your public records. No service can remove your public records from original state databases, but in some cases, you and your attorney can have those records expunged.

Privacy Monitoring
The best way to find the information available about you is to order a background check on yourself. That way, you can see all the contact information, possible relatives and property ownership related to you in public records. You can also check for errors such as damning criminal records or bankruptcies. Fix the problems you find, and ask all the sources you can to remove your data.

Your next step should be to consider an internet privacy monitoring service. Some of these are affiliated with top people search engines. These online reputation management tools can track your credit, tell you who's looking for you online, hide sensitive data about you and more. Finally, we recommend looking up your name in search engines on a regular basis. That way, you can see trouble coming and keep yourself safe.

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