I had planned on writing about something else (given that it’s really time that I got back to writing), but I just had to share this moment of Internet amazement.
I was chatting with a friend on holotrek.org, my long-time online RPG, about players who’ve left the game and we came to one of them, username of tr’Aegis, where we agreed that we missed him. He used to be an actor in NYC and my friend made a comment about him probably being a director on Broadway by now. Now, I remember the URL of his website he gave us when he was still playing and went there to see whether there were any updates. Alas, there weren’t, but his full name was stated there.
A brief Google search later, I learned that he had married a few months ago, found wedding pictures, his Facebook and Twitter page and a review about a book he had written on Amazon. There were more websites pertaining to him, probably, but I didn’t need an in-depth-search. And no, I won’t put up the links to those pages. :)
Of course I know that the Internet never forgets and that one should be careful with the information one shares. I’ve tried searches for old friends from school that yielded no information whatsoever which still surprises me. But in the case of this guy, it was surprisingly easy to obtain rather precise information within a few seconds only.
In the age of social networks, it’s probably not such a surprise and I should’ve expected the result, but it still amazed me. I’m not the most private person there is on the Internet and I know that both, Amazon and Google know a /lot/ about me, but to see someone’s wedding pictures so readily available for anyone to see – with family members in them who probably didn’t know they’d end up online – kinda shocked me.
