Even to someone like me, it’s shocking how much information is publically available on-line. Becoming an amateur private detective is getting easier all the time.
Case in point: our new house. I wanted to know who our new neighbours were, so I requested the ownership records for the parcels of land on either side of our new house.
This ended up costing me €2.83 per house, so the information’s not free, but it is publically available. At this stage, I already know the names of our neighbours and the amount they each paid for their respective houses; this in spite of the fact that the owner of the house to the right of us hasn’t even moved in yet.
Armed with this information, I turn to — what else? — Google. By now, everyone has heard of the concept of googling prospective boy- and girlfriends. Naturally, the technique works equally well for any other type of human-being.
Within seconds, I’ve found a genealogical site with details of my right-hand neighbour’s children and wife. I know the number of children he has, their names, where they were born and even the names of his wife’s parents. The only barrier to my discovering more is the speed at which I can read and assimilate the information.
After a couple of minutes, I know my right-hand neighbour’s current job and employer, as well as his last two places of work. I also know a couple of locations where he has lived in the past. To top it off, I have a photo of the man, so I’ll recognise him the first time that I see him.
Now it’s the turn of the left-hand neighbour. I can’t find anything about the man of the house, but the lady of the house starts popping up all over the place. She has quite a public function and I realise I’ve probably seen her on local TV.
What about the current owner of the house we’re buying? Of course, I’d already done the research on this person as soon as I discovered his name in the draft copy of the deed of sale I was sent for review. He turned out to have had quite an impact on the world, having invented something that has gone on to become ubiquitous in first-world households.
You’ll notice that I don’t tell you what he invented, nor what my left-hand or right-hand neighbours do for a living. Why? In a word: privacy. Yes, this is all public information, but it’s one thing for me to do the research to satisfy my own curiosity and quite another for me to dump the results in my blog and reveal people’s identity and the location of their private residence.
Along the same lines, although I also googled the address of our new house and was able to piece together which businesses had been run from there before the property was converted into a house, I can’t be specific about what I discovered without revealing its location. In fact, there’s probably already enough information in this entry for a determined researcher to start their own investigation and ultimately uncover the facts. Not that I terribly mind people knowing where I live; there are a lot of nutters running around, but what are you going to do? Hide? Nevertheless, not everyone is as comfortable with the idea.
As time goes by, this trend of people, who, once upon a time, could expect to remain all but anonymous, becoming unwitting public figures, is likely to continue. If you ever speak at a conference, write for a magazine with an on-line presence, talk to a reporter, hold a public function or simply rise to the top of your profession, the chances are that your identity can be ascertained and various facts about your life pieced together. Google, public records and a little bit of patience are all that’s required.
In case you were wondering, the man on the right hand side’s name is Bob, and the middle name of the man on the left is Willy.
Now theyre not so mysterious anymore. I know I couldnt take it, so I paid to research them as well.