Time and again I tell people to always be aware of what you post on the internet about yourself. Here is an example of why. Imagine I am an identity thief and I have decided to target you for whatever reason…it could be that I saw your myspace page and got a glimpse of personal data on you there and decided to pursue and complete the rest of the picture and take advantage of that info. You might think this should be challenging.

I am afraid with all the search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft and these engines archiving things away, it would be fairly easy to do this. In fact I came across a tool that just does this and demos exactly my point.

Go to http://www.paterva.com/wizard/. Choose what info you have (person’s name, email or phone number) and it will give you probably more accurate info you thought about the person you search for. Now, this is just a prototype and as these types of tools get more powerful, imagine how easy it will be to find out a lot about you?

So next time you decide to publish any personal information about yourself, I would think twice before doing it.