I happened on to Zoominfo today, a site that gathers information about people through crawling. It was amazing what it had found on me, most of it accurate, based on its crawling technology. It had figured out where I went to uni, the companies I had founded, and only made one notable error (it believed I worked for Nissan, when I only started a post on Nissan on a email group).
   The site allows you to verify your identity and add more information.
   About the only worrying thing is: how much of our identities are out there? I updated my info on Zoominfo, as it knew most of it already, but it got me thinking. Others may well wish to update their info, too, either out of fear (I had better do this before someone else messes with it) or resignation (it knows 90 per cent of it, so what’s the harm in giving out the remainder—it’s not as though it can’t be found elsewhere).
   Zoominfo claims it is a networking and business tool, and generally I only found business summaries there. As far as I can tell, it is all legit. And though I fell into the second group of people, feeding in information because I was resigned to the fact that what I told it was all public anyway, I still have some worries about it falling into the wrong hands—not specifically from this site, but from any site.
   Remember, once upon a time a lot of us who were early internet adopters fed our email addresses into online “Yellow Pages”, only to find we became the first victims of the spammers. Posted by Jack Yan, 22:23  permalink

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