“There must be a happy medium somewhere between being totally informed and blissfully unaware.” Doug Larson

On the same subject I wanted to mention a few other non invasive sites useful for monitoring people’s information. This is good for making sure your kid’s info is staying off the net or seeing what your friends are up to. Yesterday I talked about a passive way of being notified when new info pops up using Google Alerts. The sites below are more of an active search for information about a name or email address. Now before you read on I should say a couple of extra things. First off I recommend using your own name to try out these sites. Most people are surprised at the amount of info that shows up. Second have some perspective when you see it all. Many people say they do not have any info on the net and then I ask them if they are in the phonebook. They say yes and of course that means their info is also on the web. This annoys some but it was info that the person was not upset with being available in the first place. Perspective is useful. And now on to the list.

• Spokeo

Is not a free service but it does a nice job. It uses your address book your email to search all the basic social sites for the same names or addresses. It works but it also seems to miss a certain amount.

• Pipl

Says they search the deep web. This means all the stuff that Google does not index like at sites that require you to do a search. It does pull up a lot of info but so does a search engine. It looks for photos and public records. Good one to try but beware of the sponsored links.

• Whozat

Annoying name but decent search. It does what the others do but it also tries to cross reference other variables like your wife’s name or possible family members. I was not won over because it failed to find me in the standardly searched site Linkedin.

• PeekYou

Visually appealing and lots of options. It allows you to filter out a lot of random information. It is decent but limited

• 123 People

Visually appealing and lots of options. I like that everything has its own section. Nicely organized.

• snitch.name

The mother of them all. Put some time aside for this one. It searches all of the above sites plus a lot of the others. It shows individual windows below with the searches inside. You could go to all these sites and do the same thing or just come to this one. I am not saying it gives you better results. I am just saying it gives you a lot to wade through.

Note: Special thanks to Diane Robb for her help getting the photo of Doug Larson.