You wont need all of that anymore. I have recently come across a website that allows anyone to hunt for personal information at a single click. The website hosts a free to use service which gives information about any person just on the basis of “firstname lastname” and results in presenting a whole load of information containing photographs, email addresses, youtube videos, biographies, books, blogs, news articles, IMs and even social networking profiles including Facebook, myspace, Twitter, Linkedin and many more… The search results are aggregated from a plethora of common and uncommon search engines, social networking sites, blogs, news channels, ecommerce websites, photo album websites such as Flickr and Picasa and hundreds of other websites that you wouldnt have even heard of.

The website is 123people.co.uk. This afternoon, I tried putting in my own name and I was shocked to see quite a lot of my own information being presented on a single page. I would recommend that you search yours and check if your information is being correctly displayed?

If the website shows your accurate information as results, don’t blame your parents and complain about your unique name. The results you see on 123people.co.uk are fruits of your activities that have created information on the web which is now aggregated for anyone to spy on you. If you see too much information being displayed and would like to get rid of it, think about changing privacy settings of websites that are contributing to your information being displayed.

Just to let to know, several web ecologists at WebCoherence are working on finding solutions to these problems of personal identity management on the web. If you are willing to participate and contribute in our solution finding exercise, please write to us at webcoherence [at] gmail [dot] com.

In the meanwhile, please do leave in your comments and suggestions based on your findings and experiences. This will help us in our research.

Another creature lurking in the shadows of the Internet ecosystem is Profiling. Profiling can involve expert systems, neural networks, statistical analysis, Fourier Analysis etc. No matter what the sophistication of the underlying approach, profiling software always falls into two separate general approaches. The programs either search for patterns among the agglomerated data, or they report exceptions/simiarities in the behaviour that the data represents.

With pattern matching, the program searches for patterns in the records of customer transactions, and these are compared against variously concocted patterns. They can be checked to see if they match preconceived modes of behaviour, or conform to ‘economically rational behaviour.’

 This so-called “personalization technology” is being used everywhere, by the likes of TiVo and Amazon that use it to predict the tastes of consumers, by tracking what they watch, listen to, or buy on-line and off-line.

 Of course we have no information about the scale of profiling, or the form that particular profiles take – all we know is that some one/thing is ‘second guessing’ us.  We are told that profiling is all focussed and personally relevant, and hence in our own best interests. And indeed, in some case it is – preventing me from getting another offer of cut-priced breast implants and other random spam is welcomed! However, spammers are out there, overloading the unwary with pop-ups and e-mails.

We are being profiled whenever we surf the web, or program our TVs – whether we like it not, and we have no idea what assumptions are being made about each of us. These profiles can trigger a coherent set of actions, leading to some very funny and embarrassing situations. Trying to manipulate the profiles can often make it worse.

 Here are just two I gleaned from the Internet:

Mike Binder, a TV star, set his TiVo to record his 1999 movie, “The Sex Monster,” about a man whose wife becomes bisexual. The TiVo profiled Binder as gay, and sent him a steady stream of gay programming. He counterattacked, by recording the Playboy Channel. TiVo stopped the gay theme, however, Mike’s wife was not amused by all the half-naked women prancing around their TV.

Amazon.com founder, Jeff Bezos, gave a live demonstration to an audience of 500 people, to show just how helpful Amazon recommendations could be, using himself as an example. The top recommendation it gave him? The DVD “Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity.” That popped up because he had recently ordered “Barbarella,” starring Jane Fonda.

So keep this in mind next time you open YouTube in a public space – who knows what recommendations you will be broadcasting to those around, or what they say about you!