the ghost of christmas past came late this year

So I get sidetracked easily, contrary to popular belief although hG would contest that. He's seen the other side of me. The one I keep locked up so the rest of the world can continue to believe that I'm all grown up. Anyway, I came across a facebook update by a classmate of mine from junior high, warning people about this people-searcher called spokeo.

Curiosity got the better of me, and despite freaking out not just five minutes before at the horrible thought of having to know enough anatomy of the abdomen to "tutor" third year medical students for tomorrow, my fingers took me to the spokeo site. It's not like typing your own name into google you know. It's a tad more personal, a tad more nail-bitingish given that you have the option of searching for your online presence by username. So, I did. And a zillion things came up. Thankfully, I have an uber-common name. Yay! And, apparently, my choices of online usernames are a tad humdrum.. or so odd that nobody else in their right mind would be able to look me up. Yay!

And so, I'm sitting there clicking on everyone else's page, curious to see what my dopplegangers-by-name have put on their pages, what they look like and so forth. And then, I click on this one link that took me to my own site - a 2006 version. Was expecting to be pleasantly surprised by one of my dopplegangers-by-name, so imagine my surprise when I realized I was reading my entries of old. An odd feeling, I tell you - half spooky, half familiar. I don't recall creating it and worst of all, I don't recall why I came up with some of the pages I did. My old self in 2006 wasn't very precise either, so I didn't leave myself many clues to piece together my questions although I think I had every plan to continue my cyberspace presence there for a long long while.

How many plots of cyberspace have you claimed? How much information have you let loose for all to grab? Enough for some of 'em deep-crawlers like spokeo, intelius, or pipl to aggregate it all into a tidy little package that someone else could use to create a profile page on your behalf? Just think about it a little, and if you need to, buff up your privacy settings for your various online profiles. (Unless you actually like the prospect of acquiring a potential stalker, or two. Personally, I've been through it and it was scary as hell. I'll pass.)