I re-connected with a friend from decades ago something like that, but it took a level of indirection to make it happen.
I googled that friend, and found extremely little of him on-line, and what little I found was very old. I had some reason to suspect he might be long dead.
I found one very old research article from decades ago, that he had written with two other co-authors. So I googled those two co-authors and managed to find current e-mail addresses for both of them. So I e-mailed to both of them to ask if they knew the current whereabouts of the friend I was looking for.
The both answered me. One said he had lost contact with friend years ago. But the other gave me a current e-mail address for friend. Thus, I was able to re-connect with him. This all happened about 10 years ago, and we’ve been in regular contact since.
If you’re lucky, you might find my wedding anouncement. And then there’s Facebook. Other than that, they’re probably not me. I do not live in England, Texas or Thailand, nor do I need a visa for Saudi Arabia. How do I know about these people? They can’t spell their own name correctly and/or didn’t make sure that they email address they gave out is correct.
For the visa I replied to the writer and told them they had the wrong person. It was rather clear because in the email they had a different spelling of the first name than the email address. I got a thank you email from them.
I didn’t confirm the BBC license, or the yoga class or the dog food subscription. I’ve given up on the Thai version. I tried, but I still get emails every 3 months or so.
A few people I know, or worked with, have looked for me this way. But I probably do it to myself more often, just to keep myself aware of what my name might bring up.
My name is quite common; there are three of me in my rural county alone. The key appears to be the middle name. Searching for me without that tidbit brings up scores of me – none the real deal. Add my middle name and just “California” zeroes right in to an approximate age, address and even phone number.
I wouldn’t care. I just assume everybody dies this at some point.! Though telling the person might be odd. I had a grammar school friend tell me about the unclaimed property stuff when he found it. I thanked him and didn’t even think twice about it.
And some of it is accurate. Much is not. There is no cross-check and no legal penalty (unless you sue) for being wrong. The aggregators work on the premise that everyone is guilty unless challenged, and most people don’t know they are being accused or associated, so they don’t challenge.
Since the aggregators are selling information, the more they have on you, the better it looks for their research. Accuracy be damned. Quantity, not quality.
The aggregators go a lot farther than your list of court records, police records, etc. Recently I found something online that suggested I was using my Dad’s name (not true), but a spelling that he never, ever used, and he died over 65 years ago! They could not have gotten that from any court records, etc.; not even census records or grave records since my Dad moved and died in between census years.
I am literally the only person in the world with my entire name. I hope someone likes reading genealogy boards, because that’s where I’ve posted under my real name.
Interesting. When Google first came out, googling my name generally brought up golf courses in Scotland. (My first and last names are pretty Scottish.)
Just tried it now and actually got lots of hits about me, including a short bio as the first hit. Either Google has got better or I have a bigger web presence than I used to have.
I’d probably be mildly surprised that they knew it. I usually go by a version of my middle name. The first name is on credit cards etc., so some people do use that. Not a whole lot of people know the full legal shebang.
Whether I’d be annoyed, think it was creepy, or think it was reasonable and normal behavior would depend on why they did it and why they told me about it.
In any case, whatever version they use is going to bring up incomplete information; and will additionally bring up lots of people who aren’t me.
Good luck trying to find me; I have the same name as a famous TV person and Googling will get you 70-odd pages of his malarkey before the segue into the real-life doctors and lawyers. I might not be Googleable.
(a) Also mildly amused by the thoroughness in looking me up by full name
(b) Gently followed up with… and aren’t you disappointed at how little you found?
Myself I seldom look up people I meet in my personal life. I just am not conditioned to do this.
The general search engines will not have many entries with my full legal name, because I hardly ever put the whole thing into anything that is not, like, a government or financial form. And those entities in turn do not go around putting the entered names in a place where they can be just crawled over by Google or DuckDuckGo or whoever.
Even if you adjust for the more common ways I identify, you either wind up with a search too broad to focus properly, or if you really narrow it down you end up with mostly quotes from this board, or from tripadvisor, or (annoyingly) from sketchy sites of the sort that load a whole pile of names and tags harvested from other pages to increase their correlational hit rate (and my security software usually goes nuts if I try to look up what they’re tagging me on).
Oh, I just remembered, another apartment manager also bought one of these aggregated background checks on me and shared it with me.
The first one that I mentioned above came up with an unpaid medical bill in collections that I had never heard of. (It true that I had a LOT of medical bills in the previous several years.) It was a smallish amount, the the apartment manager said he didn’t really care about that.
The second one had this oddity: The apartment manager himself, in entering the search information for me, entered my then-address, but spelled the street wrong. The result red-flagged that, saying I had given a fraudulent address history. I pointed out the the street name was NOT what I had written on my application, so he ran the report again.
But interesting follow-up: You presumably know that your credit reports shows all your known addresses for the last several years. The mere fact that someone searched for me giving a wrong street name got that address showing on my credit reports for many years afterward, until it finally dropped off. I’m not aware of anyone who ever cared.
It doesn’t bother me, though mostly because they won’t find much. If they’re lucky they might find out some stuff here and there about me or the other two women on the planet who share my first and last name, but most of the info about any of us is drowned out about endless webpages for shoes.
I can be googled. The only person who ever told me that he googled me was an old friend I was visiting after having fallen out of touch for a while. I greeted him, and he told me he thought he should find out what I was up so, so he’d googled me. “Did you know you died a few months ago?” he told me.
So we had a nice laugh. The deceased with my name seems to have been a decent sort, so it’s all good.
I googled a new co-worker once for kicks while I was training him. (He was sitting with me when I did it.) His name turned up an embezzlement conviction and an orthodox rabbi who gave technical advice on the laws of Kashrut on-line. The embezzler was still in prison, so I’m pretty sure that was a different person. Still, that was slightly embarrassing.
I’d be perplexed and wonder how the hell did they get my first name? My first name is used only on legal documents. When I want to be semi-formal, I will use the first initial. These boards have figured out my first name based on the initial, but I’ve never had that happen in real life.
A few days ago I was contacted by a guy who bought a boat i was selling three years ago. He never paid for the title transfer, the paperwork is only good for 90 days, and now he is selling the boat (which he has no title to). It’s a not-uncommon scenario with boats and trailers.
He searched my name on Facebook and found my page. He tried messaging me, but I ignored/never saw his messages. Then he went through my friends list, found someone he knew, and got my phone number from them.:mad:
He called my number repeatedly, but my phone is set to not ring for non-contacts, so he went straight to voicemail. He then texted me and explained his problem, offering me $50 to meet him at a notary of my choosing to sign the title transfer. There’s a notary within walking distance of our house, so I figured I’d go along with his request.
But I told him he had to give up his source for my phone number. That person could have texted me and asked if I’d text the guy, but instead he just gave up my number. The boat dude really needs me to sign the transfer, but he’s hestitating on telling me who gave him my number. Meanwhile, he has a buyer lined up who wants to finalize things.
