Naked in Cyberspace: How to Find Personal Information Online (2nd ed.)

Citation

Fourie, I. (2003), "Naked in Cyberspace: How to Find Personal Information Online (2nd ed.)", Online Information Review, Vol. 27 No. 4, pp. 289-290. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520310489096

Naked in Cyberspace … can only be described as an absolute value‐for‐money book! It contains a wealth of information on personal data, where and how to find them, pitfalls that can be expected, privacy issues, etc. It is hard to imagine how much research time had to go into this book! The author, Carole Lane, is an expert on personal information and a frequently requested speaker at conferences, television shows and radio programmes. To use her own words: “The first time I was paid to travel 3,000 miles to give a speech, I knew that I officially qualified as an expert”.

Carole starts the first chapter as follows: “Sitting here in my home office, what could I find out about you? What could you learn about me? How deeply could we probe into each other’s private lives? And how many of our own closely held secrets are truly shielded from the prying keyboards of skilled researchers? Those questions are the seeds from which I have grown a busy research firm, tapping the wealth of online data to help my clients learn what they need to know about people, companies, and markets. They also are the seeds from which this book has grown. The answers will probably startle you”.

All the intricacies of searching for personal information are covered in this 587‐page publication. The style of writing is clear, well structured, and easy to follow, which makes it an excellent reference source, as well as the kind of book one can read from cover to cover (as I did).

Naked in Cyberspace … consists of 36 chapters, all of which I will mention to portray the tremendous scope of this book. The first five chapters offer some background information on personal records in cyberspace. The first chapter gives an introduction on personal records, how to use the book, and guidelines on where to find further information. This is followed by chapters on database searching, as well as the Internet, consumer online systems and personal information. Chapters 4 and 5 respectively deal with sample searchers and the issue of privacy. Chapters 6‐36 deal with different types of personal records, including the following: locating people, pre‐employment screening, recruitment and job searching, tenant screening, asset searches, competitive intelligence, identification of experts, fundraising, private investigation, biographies, general indexes, telephone directories, staff and professional directories, mailing lists, news, photographic images, quotations, bank records, business credit and company financial records, consumer credit records, criminal justice records, department of motor vehicles, death records, tax records, medical and insurance records, public records, adoption records, celebrity records, genealogical records, political records, and census records.

The last section of the book contains details on further sources for finding information. These include books, periodicals and organisations. This is followed by a number of appendices with details on, amongst other things, databases that include biographies, book directory databases, general encyclopaedia databases, news databases, consumer online databases, etc. For more up‐to‐date details, a reader can refer to the accompanying Web site at www. technosearch.com/naked/directory.htm

Each chapter is preceded by a brief, relevant, but often also amusing quotation. The chapter on mailing lists is, for example, preceded by: “Let advertisers spend the same amount of money improving their product that they do on advertising and they would not have to advertise it” (Will Rogers), while a chapter on consumer credit records starts with a quotation from John Leonard: “The rich are different from you and me because they have more credit”.

Naked in Cyberspace … includes an extensive 29‐page index. It is an excellently edited publication that I can highly recommend to anybody interested in finding personal information. It is certainly a publication that I would bring to the attention of library and information science students.