Information Overload

The grandmother of my daughter in law is a wonderful person. She is also a big user of the internet. Several times a week I get one of three types of information from her. The first are a series of laugh out loud funnies from all sorts of sources. I am not sure where she gets them - where do any of these things come from - but I appreciate the chuckles. The second are a series of inspirational things. She is a devout Christian and sends materials designed to inspire and they do. The third are a series of mailings on issues of the day, some reflect her political beliefs and some reflect concerns about the internet. This morning I received two mailings on top of each other. The first was about a service called Zabasearch. I have known about Zaba for a long period of time. It allows you to search public records databases by name and location. You get some basic information about the person and then for a fee you can get more. Zaba, in my mind, is a useful service. It includes a lot of information that was available in earlier times but now can be accessed on line. But like Google Maps, or one of the other mapping tools, it is pretty impressive and potentially scary the first time you see it. The second mailing was about Familywatch which allows a person to again access public databases to map homes and work places of sex offenders. In this case rather than concern there was support for this useful tool. The point of this is that the information comes from the same kinds of sources.

I am not sure how to explain to her how both sets of information come from the same kinds of sources and with additional information like the stuff on family watch also comes the information on where you live. What concerns me is the assumption that because you can get public records on the net some believe that anyone can get any piece of personal information about a person on the net. Every once in a while I see something from her or another person about how easy it is to get social security numbers (not) or credit histories (a bit easier) or detailed financial information (tough) about a person. But like many other technologies you cannot open up the box partially.

Personally, I like the availability of information on the net. It is handy and not really that intrusive.