Google this

Johannesburg, 15 Aug 2006

Hands up all of you who have, at some point or other, googled themselves? Only me? I must admit to - from time to time - typing in my name to see what comes up.

I`m really doing this to check what information is available about me online. Really, it`s not narcissism, and it`s not some attempt to out-entry hubby. (I have over 700 hits, he has almost 150.)

My favourite entry is one in which a contributor to an online forum says I am hardly an 'export` on Telkom`s ADSL pricing. No, I guess not; I intend to stay in sunny SA, writing about what other people say about the IT arena. This would - I guess - make me a local producer?

Then there are the dodgy photographs of me at functions, smiling cheesily at the camera. And then there was the time a wire-clipping service wrongly attached my byline to someone else`s story. Within a few days I had thousands of entries. Thankfully, it wasn`t my job to tidy it all up.

Alive and well

Pages I had been assured were trashed are still alive and well. This week I discovered someone had captured my details on something called zoominfo.com. One directory entry is an Australian nurse and one on a soccer coach. Two are from previous positions, and one of these entries has a brief - and out of date - biography.

Imagine, someone has sifted through the entire World Wide Web and catalogued my career. And, apparently I can e-mail myself from there. I sent myself an invitation to chat with myself, but have no idea who got it.

At least there are no embarrassing entries about my time at school, which thankfully predates the mass Internet era.
Nicola Mawson

At least there are no embarrassing entries about my time at school, which thankfully predates the mass Internet era.

Google is my search engine of choice, precisely because it does turn up all sorts of information. With a little bit of digging, I discovered where the unfortunate husband of the woman who rear-ended me worked. With a bit more digging - and some cash - the Internet would have revealed where he lived and his ID number.

Wealth of information

Imagine the havoc this sort of information could wreak. What if I were a serial road-rage perpetrator? I could hang around outside his house with a baseball bat and make his car look just like mine did. Or worse.

I guess this wealth of information is what prompted an intern here to state that she did not want any of her personal information on the Web. Really? And just how do you propose to stop it getting there, I asked. Typing in her name revealed what school she went to a few years ago.

Resistance is futile, embrace the privacy-free age. Google everything. I do.