Nice informative blog post.  Always helps to hear what other people are finding on the internet to help the lives of others.

In the information age, no information is sacred or private.  It's scary, and thank you for enlightening me to this fact.

Kind Regards,

Manolis

I'd like to take a look.  Please send me the invitation link.  Claudia

The first thing you should do to prevent someone from finding out past addresses, age, etc is log onto www.zabasearch.com and put your name in the search bar.  All of your information comes up that they have on the free search; the pay site has a lot more data...Income, children, etc.  It is really scary!

In order to have your personal information removed, go to the bottom of the page and click on privacy. They have 2 options for removal of your information.  I opted to write them and not do it online. 

I let clients know about this and they really appreciate it.  It is a great "good will" builder!

great informative post.  The world we live in is far different fromt aht of the previous generation to be sure.  We need to be much more prudent.

Lorena - that is a good point about zabasearch.com  i had forgotten they had that option.  I am goingto make a blog just about that.

CHris the implementer

Done!  Tracie and Lorena, I gave you both credit for the blog i created, feel free to visit if so inclined.

Chris the Implementer

http://activerain.com/blogsview/668359/Mortgage-Chili-Watch-what

Robert and Manolis - thank you for your comments.  We know there are some dishonest people out there who are looking at our information.  We have to make sure we are looking out just as closely.

Lorena - thank you for tip on zabasearch.com.  This is a great tip to pass along to friends, family, and clients.  I did a search for both my maiden and married name, plus my new husband's name; I was sick at the information available for free and for sale.  My opt-out letters will go in the mail on Tuesday.

Chris - thank you for continuing to spread the word; and for giving credit to myself and Lorena.  Scarry stuff!

Hi Tracie,

Nice Post. For unprofessional sites that you don't want people to find in search engines it is probably best that you use an alias name. Like you mentioned you can create an online profile in social network like Naymz. However you never know how the "good" and the "bad" sites will rank in search results for your name search. The reason for that may be:

1. The relevancy of the site to the name you searched
2. The number of clicks each site gets when people search for your name
3. the number of outbound links to the site
4. The page rank of the site
5. Newer and more updated sites may receive higher ranking at first and more…

The ranking may also change drastically over time… Anyway, there are a lot ways to make your site rank higher than others, probably the easiest way is to use services that create a web site for you and specialize in SEO. One service that I use (and I have many online profiles) is LookupPage (www.lookuppage.com). You can Google my name or search my name in Yahoo to see that my LookupPage is the first result :-)

BR,

Udi Drezner

All this is so true Udi.  And unfortunately no matter how diligent we all are, there will always be some things we can't fully control.  Thanks for the tip on LookUpPage.  I'll check it out soon.