From Untangling the Web, by Aleks Krotoski, pg 127-128:
As I wrote earlier in this book, if you stick “Aleks Krotoski” into an online search engine, you’ll be able to learn a lot about me. Along with basic biographical details such as where I was born and who my parents are, you can find out where I’ve worked, where I’ve lived, who I hang out with, who I’m close to, that I have a cat (and what his name is), what I like to do at the weekends, what kinds of food I like, and my email address and mobile phone number. Although in social network profiles I tend to hide behind an old close- up of a shock of pink hair (I dyed it until 2009), you’ll easily find what I look like from the snapshots that I and others have taken and uploaded, dating mostly from the last ten years but also from college and high school. With a little more digging, you’ll be able to figure out who’s in my extended family and what they do, where they live and what they’re interested in. You can easily find my home address. You might be able to get a sense of my routine – when I’m in my house and when I’m out. You’ll probably know when I’m on work trips. You might be able to pick up on which running routes are my favourites, and on which days and at what times I tend to follow those paths. It would, frankly, be easy to find me, if you were so inclined. Please don’t. But you can. In fact, if someone I didn’t know wanted to gain my trust, it’d be pretty easy to find out all this personal information and then spin it into a yarn. They might be online scammers who are trying to exploit me. They might be commercial services that want me to feel an emotional attachment to their brand. And that’s just using the information that we put out there ourselves.
Mark Carrigan 