Meddling

Once again I am in awe and fear of the powers of Internet. You can think of it as an iceberg or any other metaphors, but really, we have *no* clear way of grasping how powerful and ultimately dangerous this tool is, the one we have right at our fingertips.

Like with any beasts, the Internet may appear to have a soft heart or furry exterior. Collaboration. Open-sourced ideas. Access to learning at a monumental scale. Changing lives.

But then there’s the growls and snarls of trolls (this beast metaphor is working better than I thought). It may be harmless at a distance, but it serves as a warning: this is not something to be toyed with. This here is capable of ugliness.

And then there’s the toxic, deadly, venomous part. Not the bite, but more the swallow. Watching the most horrid part of the internet is like watching a snake swallow its prey – you knew it was coming, you understand it’s only a natural part of life, yet it’s repulsive to witness. I’m not talking about ugly comments, cyberbullying, nor even the Anonymous movement. I’m talking about /b/ at 4chan. The Deep Web.

So what triggered this? Once in a while I engage in a harmless game of online research. Of people. Mostly friends. One time me and my good friend searched each other for 5 hours. We both found each others’ complete list of sibling names, occupation of parents, and both our home phone numbers.

What’s the secret weapon? Patience. It’s almost like a drug, actually, knowing the next link or the next search page may lead to something that unearths a whole set of information. Information is knowledge, and knowledge is power. And when you come out with a list of deleted blog sites of someone you know, that’s a special kind of power.

In practice, I usually use archive.org/web/, or what’s commonly known as the Wayback Machine. This site indexes deleted sites, sort of like Google cache, but in a special way that I frankly don’t understand. Very useful.

The other day I was talking to a friend about his boyfriend, a guy I also know, and for some reason I inquired about his middle name. She didn’t know. So for fun, I set out on a search. Admittedly it also had to do with proving it can be done, for nobody ever believes it can.

After about an hour, there were some pretty good stuff. The guy’s mom wrote an article about his son’s trip to a foreign country. This easily led to the mom and dad’s full names. And their almamater. And then I stumbled upon advancedbackgroundchecks.com, fed it with the mother’s name, and was given a home address and a phone number. And a list of relatives, one of which is likely to be my friend’s boyfriend.

This is where I stop feeling superior and start to worry. This information seem accurate, and is available to me, a complete stranger, with no safety precaution whatsoever. I didn’t have to log in anything. I tried feeding a couple more names into the system, and was met with alarmingly good results. It seems to only list people in the US, much to my own peace of mind, but seriously? Is this the work of the American government? Before, this was just a game and a bit of ego stroke on my part, to prove I’m good. But at this point, even I know I’ve gone too far.

I don’t know which to fear more, the Internet or human (my own?) curiosity. One can argue: “What’s the problem with always wanting to learn, to seek answers?”, and normally I am on that sideline. But this incident made me realize: a perpetual quest for information creates a market that justifies complete disclosure of even the most private information.