Stalker skillz, I has them
It is amazingly easy to track somebody down on the Internet. Let this be a salutary lesson to you all (and to me!).
I met someone on an online forum recently and we started chatting. Now of course on a forum, everybody uses nicknames. This person (let's assume it's a woman, coz that's marginally less stalkerish) was no exception.
However! She has a blog. A specific blog dedicated to kind of stuff the forum was about. Okay, let's say it was a tech forum, therefore a tech blog. (What? You don't think I'd ever hang out in a tech forum??)
So... her blog is on a subdomain, like, say, http://tech.wilfulsunflower.com. You must remember I'm insatiably curious. I removed the subdomain and went straight to the root domain, like so: wilfulsunflower.com... and found ANOTHER blog.
Not really a personal blog, and there was not much information in the "About Me" page, but! She had a Twitter updates thingy in her sidebar! And her Twitter username is almost an actual name! Like... say... "AliceA".
Which means now I know her given name, although not her surname. Bye-bye anonymity :P
Next... I checked out all the blogs of the people she links to. And one of them had, in her links, a link called "Alice". Aha.
The link is dead. It leads to a website that doesn't exist anymore.
Here comes the Internet Archive to the rescue! You know how we used to say, "You can delete stuff from your website, but there's always Google cache"? Well, after Google cache, there's the Internet Archive. It does exactly what its name says – saves archived websites and Internet pages dating back to 1996.
I key in the dead link, and viola! A whole list of pages pops up. I visit one. An old blog pops up. She's got her Yahoo! Messenger ID displayed on her sidebar. I grab the ID and go to Yahoo's profile pages. She doesn't have a Yahoo profile up; so I google the ID, because it's fairly unique.
Guess what? She's participated on a few mailing lists and her replies to those lists – complete with her full email address – pops up. Along with... a profile on one of the blog hosting providers (think Blogger.com, Wordpress.com, LiveJournal.com, Typepad.com, etc.).
I visit the profile, where she has obligingly filled out her full birthday (she's eight years older than me! I marvel). Still only a first name, "Alice", but she also states she's from Australia, which tallies with what I already knew of the person I met on the forum.
I go to the blog. JACKPOT! Her latest post echoes her latest Twitter update... and so I know that the person on the forums really is named Alice (or else uses it as a second pseudonym), I know her email address, I know her birthday. How awesome scary is that??
Moreover, the defunct blog? It was a personal blog. From this I also know she's an atheist, and if I had the time to read through all her archives (about two years' worth) I'm sure I'd find out lots more about her.
As of 15 June 2008, I've been blogging for 6 years. I'm 30 this year, so that means I've lived one-fifth of my life on the Internet, and have blogs scattered all around – seven, at last count, plus I've moved my personal blog twice (once from Blogger.com, once from a domain with my name in it to a more anonymous domain). Makes me wonder what someone could dig up on me given the opportunity, determination, and a bit of luck. *shudders*