Guess who's watching you

I talk a lot about security and protecting yourself on the internet, which most people may see as excessive. I understand that it might seem that way but I was wandering the vast landscape of the internet and to my surprise/disgust I found another service that helps people look at you and what you're doing around the web.

It's bad enough that social networks create a privacy risk, but what's worse is that now more than ever people are seeking to exploit that risk. Some people seek to make the exploitation easier by gathering all the information they can from these networks and wrapping it complete with a bow just to send it off to some unknown person who's intent might be to steal your identity or at the very least check in on you (i.e. government agencies, employers, classmates, etc.).

The service I'm talking about specifically is http://www.peekyou.com/.

Now don't get me wrong, this service does serve a legitimate purpose in helping people find old friends or what have you but the risk involved is not worth the headache.

As much as I hate to admit it, there are those in the nerdish community that use things like this to stalk people, steal their information, and do generally malicious things. Not all hackers are evil and seek to do these things, but there are those employed by nefarious data mining companies that will. It's bad enough that people can't get anywhere on the internet without signing up for some kind of service that requires a lot of personal information, which often times gets sold to research/data mining companies but now we have the issue of people collecting all of our contact/social information.

Do this at least once in your life if you happen to get bored or if you're just generally concerned about your privacy...

Go to Google
Type in your name (First, middle initial, Last)
Hit search and see what comes up.

If by some off chance you don't see your information anywhere, add your date of birth or the city you live in to the search. I can almost guarantee that your facebook/myspace/linked in/twitter profiles will be among the results. Unless of course you've taken the advice to give out false information for things of that nature which by the way is the safest option unless you're doing some kind of banking in which case you need to make sure your information is accurate because not only is it important, generally all banks take security very seriously and won't sell your information.

So what's the 'to long; didn't read' of all this? Go get yourself taken off of these sites because the proverbial 'they' are watching.