Web Sites & Kidnapping

I was planning to make a website with pictures of my son and niece, and asked my mother if I could borrow some pictures she has of them. Well, she about hit the wall, and told me I’d better not do it because of kidnapping. I told her that I’d use one of those password protected sites, like Myfamily, but she still insisted that perverts could find out where we live and take our children. I’m really doubting that this would happen, but to be on the safe side (and maybe get some info. to appease mom), I’d like to know:

  1. How easy would it be for somebody to find out my home address just from looking at a website. Of course, I would not use the children’s full names or our exact location.

  2. Has anyone ever actually kidnapped a child in this manner?

I think most of the bad stuff perpetrated by evil strangers on the internet involves some degree of interaction via chat room, message board, email, etc. If you don’t provide any trackable info on the site, the best an evil stranger might do is identify your ISP. There’s a handful of Dopers who know my name, address and phone number, but only because I’ve given it to them. Even in light of all the personal details I’ve dropped here, I think it would be very difficult to ID me, or anyone else here without some direct help from that person.

This topic also makes me think of the old burglary prevention strategem - just make your house harder to break into than your neighbors’. There lots of sites out there where people give their names and addresses.

I think if you’re careful about the info you put up, you’re quite safe.

Yeha, don’t sweat it, they can’t find out where you live unless you come out and say it. Get with s business that does web pages professionally. Or, you could ask Cecil to get the straight dope.

That’s what I thought, but since I don’t know much about computers, I wasn’t sure if it was possible or not. I suppose some sort of super-hacker could find a way, maybe break into my ISP’s billing records or something, but it seems like that would be too much effort. It’s probably lots easier to just snatch kids the old fashioned way.

Make sure your reply address in email does not indicate your full name. Someone may write you saying they are a parent too, and their kids loves ballet as well, for example. They may masquerade as a child in their email. You respond, they see your last name. They skip over to the white pages, and they find out where you live.

Do not use your full name on the web site.

Do not name the school your kids go to.

You might omit your exact town, just mention “Northern Montana…”, etc., at most.

People become obsessed with media, and you never know who might have a likin’ for the kiddies and become obsessed. While rare, if you disclose the information, you have put them in control.

Also the issue with kids is that you can’t be with them all of the time. You may feel free advertising your business and it’s location, even providing snaps of the staff.

Kids are a lot more vulnerable.
Do the right thing - Be safe.

Make sure you are the only one with access to the email coming from the site - if any.

This way the kids will enjoy it and be totally safe.

First of all you would be suprised at how much info on you is out there and how easy it is to locate folk.

Second I think your kid is in much greater danger of being molested by someone who lives near you and personally knows you.

Sure you hear about “Net” kidnappings etc but they are not common compared to face to face encounters.

Any of you recall the Oprah show where she set people up. The parents proudly declaring there kids would never go with stranger, while right behind them the kids were doing exactly that.

But back to the OP most people find out about you by talking to you or your friends, relatives. People mean well but have big mouths.

If you have an original web site name it can be Pinged. When that is done, the name, address, phone etc of the owner is displayed. You can get a program to do that for free from download.com.

You can input a person’s email address into a people search engine & it can show who they are. You can input a phone number the same way and see who it belongs to. You can get a program to ‘finger’ someone. Most of the time it won’t display any info, but if successful & you finger a person’s email address you can get soooomuch personal information about them, you’d be floored.

OK you’re all being silly. Stop it. This is ridiculous.

  1. No one will come to your web page unless you advertise it.

  2. No one will come to your web page even if you do advertise it. Face it, you’re just not that interesting. A family web page is the equivalent of someone forcing you to look at their baby pictures.

Finger won’t return anything unless that person puts the info there themselves. If they know enough about what finger is to use it then they wouldn’t put any information there that they don’t want people to know.

Konrad, you mean the whole world isn’t eagerly awaiting the debut of my web page? Man, my self-esteem is like seriously damaged.

Actually, that was one of my main points in my little disagreement with mom, but she remains convinced that there are legions of child molesters searching the internet for pictures of kids. The sad fact is most children are molested/kidnapped/harmed by people known to the parents. Kind of disturbing, eh?

Handy, first off you mean doing a WHOIS not a PING. A Ping just gets you a reply saying “yes this machine is running”. Second, the word you are searching for is “domain name” not “original website name” which would imply something else (like “Joe Bob’s Fancy Homepage” vs “joebob.com”).
That said, you still have a lot of control about what comes up in a WHOIS (which is ONLY relevant if you own the domain name, going through a free service or even your local ISP will render this all irrelevant) For example, see this domain that I registered recently: WHOIS camgirlsring.com

Second, unless you enter personal information about yourself in public ways, doing a lookup on someone’s email address will not get you any personal info. Likewise, finger just returns you the contents of a part of a file, which the person had to put the information into in the first place.

I’ve had a personal website for the last 5 years with photos of my son on it and we’ve never had a problem, if that is any comfort to anyone. Just be careful what information you put on it.



Teeming Millions: http://fathom.org/teemingmillions
“Meat flaps, yellow!” - DrainBead, naked co-ed Twister chat
O p a l C a t
www.opalcat.com

Konrad - thank you for being the voice of reason.
Tatertot, I have had a myfamily websit for a year or so now. Only those that I send a password to can access it. As for hacking, never had a problem. There are no places where I have Had to list our actual address or locations, only an optional address book.
Hope this helps. These websites can be great for relatives that live far away.

Life is a tragedy to those who feel…and a comedy to those that think

Op, you’re right, sorry it was early in the morning. Still what does that mean about the cam girls site?:

Domain Name: CAMGIRLSRING.COM
Registrar: CORE INTERNET COUNCIL OF REGISTRARS
Whois Server: whois.corenic.net
Referral URL: www.corenic.net
Name Server: NS.CAIS.COM
Name Server: NS2.CAIS.COM

I’m not sure if this really pertains to the question at hand, but I’ll share anyway. My fiance put up a fairly nice page with some poetry, pictures of the area where we live, pictures of our cats, and other miscellaneous assorted mundane stuff about six months ago. I point lots of people I chat with to the page because the pictures are worth seeing. Anyway, I just noticed a few days ago that our full address and home phone number are right on the front page, and nothing seems to have come of it. I don’t even get telemarketing phone calls.

Neenah

Someone mentioned “super-hackers” upthread. Sometimes this happens! Just yesterday, I heard on the radio that someone hacked into the server for a big online music store, and stole a bunch of credit card numbers and the associated personal info. I think the website was BudgetCDs.com or something similar, but I really didn’t catch the name so don’t quote me on it. But the story gets worse! The hacker wanted to be payed $100,000 by the company to prevent him from disseminating the numbers. The company refused–and the guy posted the credit card numbers, names, etc on a website where anyone could look at them. The site has been shut down, but apparently it’s too late. Some numbers have already been used fraudulently.


–It was recently discovered that research causes cancer in rats.

http://ftpsearch.lycos.com/

Try this search. It can find anything! It goes through people’s FTP sites. So far with a little cleverness Ive been able to find just about any commercial software, pictures,
or whatever. I found numerous private pictures.

To echo Neenah’s comments, I have a web page with my home address and telephone number listed on it. I’ve never been bothered. I don’t even get that much junk mail at the e-mail address listed on my home page. (On my AOL account, on the other hand, I get tons of junk mail.)

As Konrad said, no one cares enough to go to my home page, except maybe my friends and family.

I went through the same analysis before putting my my kid’s baby pictures. Here’s what I came up with:

If I were a child molester, why would I search the internet to find kid’s pictures and go after them? They’re likely in another state- requiring a long trip, etc., when it is so much easier to see dozens of kids at a mall, etc. right in town, and follow them home.

It wouldn’t be that hard to figure out a kid’s address given the first name and approximate date of birth. You might be able to get clues about the city or town from the ISP, or if you tell what hospital they were born at, etc. The point is that is probably far easier to find kids locally, and just drift from town to town, instead of travelling to specific towns in search of specific kids.

My site has been picked up by some search engines without any action on my part. Some engines automatically try new domains to see if anything is there. If that bothers you, don’t put your main page at the root of your domain- for example, if your ISP is patriot.net, and you are given the address www.patriot.net/~smith, don’t put your main page there, put it at www.patriot.net/~smith/website, or something, and don’t have any links to it from anywhere else. That way no search engine should find it behind your back. You don’t really need a password in this case, since no one could get the address unless someone gave it to them.

Arjuna34

Now there’s something you don’t hear very often.