Google Inside's author noticed recently that you can now do a reverse phone book look up straight from the front page of Google. He says he got a hang up call, typed the number into Google's search window, hit enter, and got the name and address of the Phone's owner.

Am I the only one that is slightly creeped out by how much information Google actually has access to?

Well, probably not...

The more profound question is this: How much do we choose to share about ourselves on the web without giving much thought to who might see it?

David Griner had a thought-provoking piece recently about privacy on the web. He relates a conversation he had with a friend that started after he suggested that participating in social media could put our jobs at risk. David's friend compares sharing something about yourself in a closed room of friends as opposed to in the open universe of social media on the web.

The truth is that at least if I stand on my roof with a megaphone and yell stuff about myself, the sound eventually dies and all that exists after that is what my neighbors remember. With Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc., it's a relatively permanent record. People can bookmark it or download it.

Can I find stuff on you? It depends. If you Google me ("Greg Cruey" with the quotes), you get a lot of stuff about me. I live on the web. Just the first 20 links have my personal blog, my Facebook and LinkedIn pages, my Suite101 profile, and a small host of blog entries I've written. You can find out a lot about me on those pages. And after a dozen or so years of writing for the web, my name turns up on about 15,000 pages according to Goggle. Google my wife and you get 34 entries. You get the web page of a closed school she used to teach at. You get a Classmates.com profile for someone (probably one of my distant relatives) who shares both her first and last name. You get a couple of dead links and a few pages where I've mentioned her by name in something I wrote.

How much is out there really does depend on what you share...

© Zach Klein